Navigating the Job-Seeking Journey: Challenges and Opportunities for Digital Employment Support in Kashmir

The issue of youth unemployment is a global concern, with active initiatives, policies, and technologies in place to support employment seekers. Despite these efforts, youth unemployment in various regions is attributed to the complex challenges that impede access to resources, particularly in contexts characterized by socio-political unrest. To understand the use of job-seeking resources in such a context, we situate our work in the region of Jammu & Kashmir, which has a long-standing history of socio-political conflict ongoing for more than three decades. For this work, we conducted 21 semi-structured interviews with participants from Kashmir to understand their current job-seeking practices and the challenges they encounter during the entire process. Our findings present the systemic infrastructural challenges the youths face due to the ongoing crisis. Analyzing the youths' workarounds to mitigate these challenges, we discuss how we might leverage these workarounds into designing systems while navigating through the contextual complexities. We discuss the challenges of designing in the context and provide design recommendations to support job seekers.