Postal dept offers package to handle hiring applications

Moving beyond selling application forms, the Department of Posts (DoP) has started offering a complete package to agencies and companies for their recruitment process.

In a first of its kind, the postal department will sell, collect and send application forms for recruitment of people in the central paramilitary forces, including the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) and Border Security Force (BSF), a senior DoP official told Business Standard.

The service has been started across 1,000 locations in all major cities. DoP is expected to earn about Rs 10 crore annually as revenue from this. It started selling about 3.1 million application forms over a month earlier, the official added. It is to extend this ‘total solution offering’ to other companies.

The post offices across 1,000 locations in all major cities have been mandated for this new task. After obtaining application forms from these designated post offices, the interested candidates would be able to give these in there and these would then be sent to the respective locations. This would open a new stream of revenue for the postal department, the official added.

The department has also started giving internal training to its employees on general understanding of the whole business, as well as the customers.

Earlier, the department used to focus on retail customers who used to come and visit post offices for accessing various services. It is now preparing to extend its hand to business clients. “Now, we are even going out and looking for business clients. We are also keeping in mind the different requirement and needs of business clients, so we customise our solutions accordingly.”

The department also recently got the Reserve Bank of India’s permission to launch a prepaid debit card, in partnership with Master Card, to allow customers to purchase products from all major retail outlets across the country. The prepaid debit card by India Post would have a minimum value of Rs 1,000 and a maximum of Rs 50,000.