For over two decades, Bdjobs, Bangladesh's largest online job platform, has catered primarily to formal sector corporations and multinationals with dedicated human resources departments, predominantly targeting the graduate job market. However, the company has now set its sights on the nation's vast informal micro, small, and medium enterprise (MSME) sector, which provides employment to a staggering 87% of the country's active labor force.
To serve this market of over 7 million MSMEs, Bdjobs has launched an affordable, mobile-friendly "SME package" with a radically simplified user experience. Priced from just 500 taka ($5) per job posting compared to 2,900 taka for a standard corporate clients package, the tailored offering enables SMEs to list openings/post jobs, receive applications, shortlist candidates with one click, schedule interviews, and conduct online assessments—all paperless processes.
"Over the last few years, we have realized that our marketplace mostly served well-organized corporate companies and multinationals with HR departments," says Bdjobs Founder and CEO Fahim Mashroor. "However, the largest employer in Bangladesh is the informal MSME sector, which we didn't extensively work with before as we were unprepared from a supply side perspective and they were not tech-savvy. But now, this segment is becoming more tech-enabled, connectivity is better, and broadband penetration is increasing. We see a demand from MSMEs and believe we can serve them now."
The move makes perfect sense from a strategic perspective given that there is a ceiling to the formal sector job market.
Bdjobs has been on a roll of late. The company has significantly improved its recruitment solution for corporates, setting itself on a path to becoming a complete recruitment solution, it has introduced a pro version for job seekers with a bundle of additional features and now with the MSME package, it effectively positions itself as an organizing platform for all hirings in the country.
By making its platform accessible to smaller businesses, Bdjobs can tap a market that creates the bulk of Bangladesh's employment opportunities but has historically been underserved by digital recruitment services. MSMEs in sectors like retail, restaurants, diagnostics, and automotive workshops are already flocking to the platform.
“In the last one year, over 10,000 MSME companies took services under this package," says Prokash Chowdhury, Director of Marketing and Sales at Bdjobs.com. Currently, companies who are publishing jobs for the first time on Bdjobs having employee sizes 1-25 are eligible for this package, he added.
The solution makes perfect sense for MSMEs who often face challenges with hiring and retaining employees that hamper their productivity and growth. Unlike the formal sector job market, there are not many services that provide recruitment solutions to MSMEs. With an inexpensive and easy-to-use solution, Bdjobs can help MSMEs automate their hiring, resulting in immediate productivity gain for these small businesses.
Bdjobs expects its paying client base to swell from 30,000-40,000 currently to 100,000 over the next couple of years, with MSMEs accounting for a "significant percentage" of new sign-ups. The company projects this MSME-led expansion will transform its business.
"This is one of our strategic directional shifts—our new growth on the employer client end will be MSME-driven," states Mr. Fahim. "Although we are charging just 500 taka from these SMEs, the volumes will be tremendous."
From a growth perspective, this is a significant move for Bdjobs. It already has exhaustive penetration in the corporate and formal sector job market. The focus on MSMEs opens a huge new growth opportunity for the company.
Bdjobs has made significant investments in building the product for this segment and in preparing as an organization to ensure fulfillment for this new segment.
A key priority has been developing a commensurate supply of job candidates for roles like cooks, drivers, and technicians that MSMEs typically hire for. Bdjobs has launched vocational job fairs, leveraged its dedicated "fulfillment team" to directly source applicants, and introduced location-based job matching to cater to SMEs' hyper-local hiring needs.
"For us, it is not enough to just onboard these new MSME clients, we have to ensure they can successfully find the right talent through our platform," asserts Mr. Fahim. The company claims an impressive 80-90% placement rate currently across the sectors it serves.
Bdjobs has also invested heavily in tech. Bdjobs knew from its experience that while formal sector corporations usually have dedicated departments to manage hiring, SMEs are different, where owners usually handle all these tasks themselves.
The main challenge for Bdjobs was to make the product simple so that SME owners could handle it easily without spending a ton of time. The entire experience is paperless from application receiving, shortlisting, contacting candidates, and even interviews. Bdjobs realized that since most SMEs don't have an HR department if they needed to do it with paper, they wouldn't be able to manage it. Bdjobs has worked on this at the product level over the last two/three years and now users can do everything paperlessly. The way the product works now, SMEs can post jobs, candidates can only apply online, and employers can make shortlists in one click, call for interviews, conduct online exams if needed, and take video or in-person interviews.
"We have seen that the user experience for MSMEs has to be much easier and more intuitive compared to big corporations," explains Mr. Fahim. "But making a user experience easy and intuitive is always a bigger challenge. We invested heavily in our product, launching a simplified UX this year. Earlier, posting a job took 20-30 minutes, but now it can be done in 2-3 minutes with applications received within an hour. Making the user journey easy was a major focus, as we realized MSME owners have limited time after running their businesses. So we simplified many features to make our product more accessible for MSMEs."
The MSME expansion offers Bdjobs an immense opportunity to solidify its position as Bangladesh's preeminent employment platform serving the entire economy—from corporate and development sector giants to neighborhood mom-and-pop shops.
As the company notes, leading job portals in more digitally advanced markets like Malaysia and Indonesia derive over half their business from the SME segment. The company says the timing is about right for Bdjobs to take a similar approach in Bangladesh.
Facilitating this strategic move has been Bangladesh's improving digital infrastructure, smartphone penetration, and mobile payment systems. "Digital payment has been a major enabler. For an affordable, low-cost MSME product, payment has to be seamless," notes Mr. Fahim. The country's maturing ecosystem has allowed Bdjobs to roll out competitively priced services for the informal sector.
By straddling both the formal and informal economies, Bdjobs is positioning itself as the connective tissue of the entire national labor market. Looking ahead, the company plans to introduce peer-to-peer services enabling individuals to hire personal staff like caregivers and drivers through the platform.
"Our product was designed earlier for corporate requirements, but now we are promoting our service for the whole of Bangladesh—from corporates to MSME," explains Mr. Fahim.
Bdjobs’ strategic expansion from primarily serving large firms to embracing the informal MSME sector reflects the ground realities of the Bangladeshi employment landscape. As it cements this critical move, the pioneering job-tech platform is positioning itself to dominate and organize the country's entire hiring ecosystem—from white-collar offices to neighborhood tea stalls—for the foreseeable future.
For now, as it works on executing its MSME product, it wants to remain focused on delivering the best value for the MSMEs hiring through Bdjobs.
“For us, it is not enough to onboard MSMEs, we have to ensure that they can successfully find the right candidates and hire through our platform,” asserts Mr. Fahim. “We are investing so that we can serve these SMEs and fulfill their requirements.”
