Kormo, the jobs and career marketplace, keeps on evolving. In recent times, Kormo has added a host of new features to its platform mostly around learning and job seekers’ development. It could be said that the platform, which started with an ambition to disrupt the old school job search and recruitment process with technology, has gone big into the skill development space over the past few months.
Learning has been a key component to the Kormo platform from the beginning. It has an integrated learn tab called Kormo Learns and says it has helped hundreds of job seekers prepare for various jobs. The platform now aims to double down.
The move makes perfect sense for Kormo as it aims to solve problems for both job seekers and employers by enabling the best match for both. Development of job seekers is essential because finding the right candidate remains a challenge for most employers in Dhaka.
At the same time, concerted efforts to solve the skills gap challenge are scarce at best in Dhaka. Since Kormo works with both employers and job seekers, it has access to exclusive market insight regarding the most in-demand skills and skill gaps in the market, which gives it a natural advantage when it comes to the skills development of job seekers.
This is what Kormo has been working on for a while now. In a recent Google Maps announcement event that took place on July 16th at the city’s Lakeshore Hotel, where Kormo was also showcased, the platform announced a host of new learning features for its job seekers. Post-event Kormo has also shared exclusive updates with Future Startup regarding its initiatives and developments around helping job seekers with job readiness in Bangladesh.
The newly improved learning features and updates seen by Future Startup clearly indicates the seriousness with which Kormo is approaching the development of job seekers on its platform.
In fact, some of the features suggest that Kormo is putting the development and job readiness of job seekers at the center of its platform strategy - a strategy we predicted Kormo would seek out in the past. More on that in a moment. First an introduction to Kormo Learns.
“Kormo currently helps job seekers in 3 simple ways,” says Kormo Co-founder and Product Lead Bickey Russell, “1) it helps anyone to quickly build a profile that works like a digital CV. 2) That profile - which continues to update as you use the app - personalizes your experience. Jobs are recommended to you and shown to you through an easy-to-use feed. 3) Online training and upskilling opportunities are directly built into the app.”
If you pay attention, it clearly shows that Kormo Learns is at the center of everything that Kormo does for their job seekers.
Kormo Learns allows job seekers on the Kormo platform to find relevant content, courses and training materials built into the app. Kormo works with online and offline partners to develop educational content for Kormo Learns. It offers a host of opportunities to partner content creators in the form of co-marketing, real-time data and insight for ideas and execution excellence, partnership ecosystem and opportunities to further collaborate, and free distributions.
Kormo has developed a standard approach to developing learning materials for users. It seeks to make its training content friendly, accessible, personalized, localized, and interactive with an intention to make the content engaging as possible. It has been working on a content discovery system to improve the discovery of contents based on a few criteria such as engagement, recency, affinity, interest and content type.
Kormo claims 7 out of 10 job seekers on Kormo who are selected for interviews are frequent users of the Kormo Learns tab. This has resulted in a positive response from the employers, many of whom reported that the candidates coming through Kormo are more qualified and more prepared for their jobs.
Over the past months, Kormo has doubled down on its learning features with an ambition to make the learning more effective and to encourage job seekers to upskill and learn. In order to encourage job seekers to use its learn tab and upskill themselves, the platform introduced a set of new incentives. A new feature called Badges has been introduced. A Badge/ Badges works as a reputation score and skill certification for job seekers. When a job seeker completes a course or consumes a particular content relevant to a particular job, all of the learning outcomes culminate in the form of a badge that certifies the skills of the job seeker.
Kormo discovery engine recommends content and courses to job seekers based on their interests as well as on the requirement of a particular job. Upon the completion of particular content or course, Kormo Learns adds a particular badge to the profile of the candidate which works as a credential for that candidate when recruiters review and screen the CV of the candidates. Kormo has added a few badges and says more badges are coming and are tied to various activities of job seekers in the app.
Kormo, developed under Google’s Area 120, Google’s own incubator program that deals with developing new innovative solutions for emerging markets, was formally launched in September 2018 in Dhaka. From the beginning, the platform said it wants to connect more people to urban opportunities and help job seekers to level-up their skills by providing career development tips and information. In simple, Kormo is a two-sided marketplace serving job seekers and businesses. It aims to solve multiple consequential problems for each side of its platform.
Job as a category is critical and interesting for several reasons. For employers, hiring the most relevant people is of paramount importance – meaning in an ideal world they should be happy to invest in ensuring that they get to hire the right people. For job seekers, getting a job and then getting the right job, these are critical goals and in order to increase her odds of getting the best option, she should be happy to invest as well. There are natural incentives for both parties here.
To that end, one important ambition for Kormo is to fix the broken job search and matching problem in Dhaka. Although it looks like a problem of job seekers from the outside, it is not. It is an even bigger problem for employers. Because as I mentioned earlier, employers also need to hire the right and skilled people.
That’s why Kormo wants to do a good job at solving problems for job seekers. Giving them a seamless and reliable experience. Helping them build a portable digital profile through ranking and rating and other mechanisms and also giving them education and training to upskill.
Kormo not only wants to build an end- to- end solution for job seekers, it also wants to provide career development opportunities for job seekers through educational content and courses.
These facilities for job seekers are essentially tied to what Kormo aims to build for employers. This is apparent if you look at how difficult a challenge hiring is in Dhaka. It is a complex and multifaceted challenge – 1) finding candidates with the right skills 2) managing the entire hiring process, - particularly screening a challenge when you receive a disproportionate number of applications for a single opening.
By building a seamless experience for job seekers and then helping them upskill and suggesting jobs based on the home location and qualification of a candidate, Kormo aims to solve both of these problems for employers. Kormo Learns plays a critical role in achieving that goal.
As I mentioned earlier, the development of job seekers is a critical component of the Kormo ecosystem. When Kormo helps upskill job seekers, it essentially improves its ability to provide better candidates to employers increasing its value to them. Kormo is apparently walking this path.
Along with launching new learning features for its app, Kormo is taking the skill development push offline. It has started experimenting with connecting Kormo users to offline training in partnership with multiple partners. It has partnered with BRAC to identify job seekers who could potentially go up in their careers with more hands-on training. Under the partnership, BRAC collaborates with Kormo to identify relevant Kormo users to participate in classroom-based training delivered by BRAC. After completing training, job seekers come back to Kormo to get the job they are now more eligible for. It has already launched a pilot and says has seen a positive response from both job seekers and employers and plans to ramp-up the pilot.
Kormo Learns is essentially changing the value of Kormo to both job seekers and employers. However, we have to wait and see how it turns out for Kormo in the long run.
