Google unveils stealth app to help Bangladeshis find jobs

Google has unveiled a stealth app to help the people in Bangladesh in finding jobs on Thursday, reports Tech in Asia.

A team from Google’s Area 120 startup incubator announced that it has been working quietly behind the scenes on a new app called Kormo, which helps the people in Bangladesh find jobs.

“The team is now ready to come out of stealth mode,” said Bickey Russell, who leads the Kormo team.

Kormo, which means “work” in Bangla, went live about a year ago in Dhaka and has matched over 21,000 jobs to its users.

The app focuses on the “informal economy,” referring to the unregulated forms of employment. Contracts, fixed pay, and pensions, among others, are absent, and that opens up employees to many risks. To top that off, work credentials and past experiences are rarely documented.

“What you see in the informal economy is a lot of unemployment and a lot of underemployment,” Russell told Tech in Asia.

“We saw this problem firsthand in Bangladesh. People regularly struggle to find employment and are unaware of what to do, and employers complain about not being able to find talents or hire effectively,” the 36-year-old project head added.

South Asia’s informal economy stands at 80 to 90 percent of the labour force, according to the International Labour Organisation, which estimates that 87percent of Bangladesh’s labour force is employed in this way. Approximately two million of its citizens enter the workforce each year.

Using Kormo, users can update their resumes, look and apply for jobs, and even access content that helps them develop essential work skills like communication and interview prep — a feature the team is proud of. Kormo’s algorithm also recommends jobs to users based on their work experience and interests.

According to Russell, the app helps employers identify irresponsible workers by including performance ratings and references on the job seekers’ profile page.

For example, job seekers who consistently fail to turn up for interviews will receive a low rating. This holds them accountable for their inaction, and employers will be able to weed out flaky job seekers earlier.

And if the user gets the job via a successful match on Kormo, this will be reflected in their profile. The app automatically updates the user’s in-app resume, and the team has received positive feedback about this feature.

“One big problem with the informal employment is that there is no clean way to track records or credentials. Building a reputation online is something we think is very important in employment across the board,” said Russell.

The app, which is still in the early stages of development, currently serves over 30 different job categories in the services sector including sales, ecommerce, and hospitality. Over 1,000 companies have been posting job ads on Kormo since its quiet launch.

Another problem with job-seeking in the informal economy is that job discovery occurs mostly offline. While employers are constantly on the lookout for new hires and short-term employees, job ads do not appear on regular sites such as LinkedIn or national job portals.

They chose Dhaka to incubate a product like this as a large young population in the city use smartphones and apps, said Russell.

According to him, most of these young adults entering the workforce have smartphones, but lack the knowledge and awareness about how to start their career. He aims to fix that with Kormo.

The team plans to expand the business geographically. They intend to include more job categories and increase Kormo’s footprint countrywide, and even outside of Bangladesh, as the product matures.

The team of 12, most of whom have been Google employees for a while, is now working on developing and perfecting the app full time. Russell’s team belonged to one of the first cohorts when Google launched its Area 120 startup incubator just under two years ago.

Projects within Area 120 get a budget to spend on hiring, marketing, and design, and the chance to be integrated into Google’s main products if they’re a success.