BDjobs.com, the leader in job portal space in Dhaka, has evolved significantly over the last couple of years. It has dramatically improved its technology, platform and, UX for its existing users, who are mostly white-collar job seekers.
The company is now eyeing for further growth by making the platform more useful to employers when it comes to hiring right candidates and opening it up for specialized skilled jobs, blue-collar job seekers to be precise, said its founder Fahim Mashroor.
Your complete recruitment system
The company has added multiple new features and is working on a couple more for the employers in order to make it easy for employers to screen applications and help ensure better employee-employer matching.
From a job opening announcement tool, the company is now working to become a part of the entire recruitment process.
Initially, the problem for employers was announcing open positions and reaching out to interested job seekers and get applications. “BDjobs used to be a part of that announcement process and make sure that a job circular gets to the maximum number of potential candidates,” says Fahim Mashroor. “We used to help companies to post their job circular like they used to put them in any newspaper. BDjobs has done that job very well over the last few years.” It now plans to solve a different problem.
The problem for employers, though, is much different now. They receive a large number of applications for any job posting they make on bdjobs.com, said Mr. Fahim. Screening the applications, finding the right candidate, and managing the entire recruitment process are a couple of big problems that bother employers.
BDjobs sees this as a big opportunity for its future growth and working hard to becoming a part of the entire recruitment process, starting from announcement to interview to final recruitment, of a company.
“We are working hard to make communication between employee and employer frictionless, and also create scoring and all kind of systems to help employers pick the right candidates from a sea of applications,” Fahim says.
Finding the right candidate is a huge problem in Dhaka. For companies, it takes up a considerably huge time to screen CVs and even then, sometimes it all turns into a mere futile exercise.
Solving this problem, helping employers to find right candidates and smoothening communication between candidates and employers, is going to be one of the next big growth opportunity for BDjobs.
The company has rightly identified the opportunity and is using some form of machine learning and artificial intelligence for matching candidates with employers requirements, adding scoring system and introducing automation to several parts of the process.
An emerging user base
However, that’s only part of its ambitious plan. The company is going beyond that. While it is working hard to improve its platform for both existing white-collar job seekers and employers, it is also plotting to bring an entirely different segment of users on its platform, i.e. technical skilled people, technicians, drivers, even housemaid type job seekers. BDjobs.com calls this segment specialized skilled workers.
“We are now focusing more to bring people who once did not have the access to internet and was not a part of the process,” says Fahim. “We are calling them specialized skilled people”.
BDjobs did not address this segment of job seekers or jobs before, despite the fact that there is a huge demand from employers side for these type of candidates said Fahim.
Part of the reason was these segment of people did not have access to internet, but now they are joining the grid through mostly mobile.
“There has always been a demand for skilled drivers, technical people i.e. people who can operate sophisticated machines, trained nurses, trained cooks, and the likes. Despite the demand, we never tried to fill the gap because that was difficult just about two years ago but now things are different. These people are now using internet, mostly through mobiles, and coming online. So we thought, well, we have this opportunity to solve this problem as well and why not try. And it is also true that this market is way bigger than the white-collar graduate job market.”
The company has already started to organize events in different parts of the country, mostly in polytechnic colleges, technical institutes, nursing institutes etc. The purpose is to bring these people on its platform.
“There is already employers for these segments but the challenge for us is to bring job seekers to apply for these jobs,” says Fahim.
New challenges
Reaching out to this segment of the users involves significant product and marketing challenges. BDjobs seems to understand that. These people are mostly mobile users, said Fahim. In order to make the platform useful to them, it has to be mobile first and unlike graduate application form, which is long and detail, this needs to be short and simple so that users can easily fill it up from mobile devices.
BDjobs has already started to address some of these problems. It has already created a separate segment namely specialized skills jobs on its website, is designing customized user interface for this segment of users and making it mobile first.
The company is also pushing its mobile app heavily. App is way more intimate than web and used more frequently by our users, said Fahim.
The next wave of internet users are mobile and are people who previously did not have the access to internet. This is a huge opportunity, particularly in a country like Bangladesh where a large number of population is still live outside of the grid.
BDjobs’s move to bring part of this population on its platform is a brilliant strategy and will fuel its growth in the future. It will also allow the company to sustain the growing competition in the space again, using the first mover advantage to bring an entirely different segment on its platform.
However, this new move will also bring new challenges for the company. It will create a communication problem since the languages of these two segments is different. However, we have to wait to see how this new growth push unfolds for BDjobs.com, one of earliest successful internet companies in the country
