Blue-collar recruitment is the hiring of delivery riders, warehouse workers, drivers and other manual workers, often thousands a week, through the messaging apps those workers already use. Blue-collar means work done with the hands, as opposed to office work. In India, this recruitment increasingly happens on WhatsApp, run by an AI recruiter. It is a form of AI recruiting.
This kind of hiring is different from hiring for an office job. The numbers are very large. A delivery company may need several thousand riders before a festival season, and many riders leave within a few months. Most applicants do not have a CV, and many do not use email. Many prefer to type, or to send voice notes, in Hindi, Telugu, Tamil or another Indian language. And they want an answer the same day.
So the software meets them in a chat. A worker sees an advertisement and sends "Hi" to a WhatsApp number. A chatbot replies in the worker's language, through the WhatsApp Business API. It asks a few short questions: which area the worker lives in, whether they own a two-wheeler, and whether they have a driving licence. A worker can reply with a voice note. Speech recognition turns the voice note into text. The bot then matches the worker to the nearest employer that is hiring, and books a time for them to visit.
For instance, a quick commerce company needs 800 delivery riders across Lucknow in two weeks. Each rider will work from one dark store, a small neighbourhood warehouse. The recruitment platform runs advertisements, and 12,000 people start a chat. Of these, 5,000 meet the conditions: they live within 5 km of a dark store, own a two-wheeler and hold a licence. The bot books visits for them, and 2,100 actually come. The dark store managers onboard 850 of them, after checking each rider's Aadhaar and driving licence. Platforms of this kind are usually paid for each worker who joins.
Most delivery riders are not employees. They are independent workers paid per delivery. The page on gig workers explains what this means for their pay and their rights. When a business sells to its customers or serves them inside a chat in the same way, this is called conversational commerce.