How Google’s NBU Initiative (Kormo) is Shaping the Future of Hiring
Over the past year or so in Dhaka, I have been lucky enough to work with a group of awesome Googlers who are working relentlessly to develop a technology solution designed from the ground up to bridge the gap between job seekers looking for work, and, employers who need to hire quickly and reliably. In trying to solve this major employment challenge that exists the world over, it has been fascinating to to see how they have been developing their application, Kormo, with a clear mindset to make their product helpful to the lives of people living right here in Dhaka. Building products that are helpful in the local context, with a potential to serve billions of users, is the directive of Kormo’s wider team at Google, the Next Billion User (NBU) organisation.
Generally, one of the major investments for HR professionals, especially for businesses with large recruiting needs, is the time and effort they spend in sorting out thousands of CVs and applications they receive in order to find the best fit candidates for the available positions. The manual tasks involved in the process are a test for anyone’s patience. This is where Kormo’s smart matching and sorting come in to play. The tool automatically finds the best fit from the pool of candidates that apply for the job. In essence, the system does the work of sorting through all the CVs and recommending the shortlist so the recruiters don’t have do. That said, if a recruiter would like to, they can scan through all applicants themselves and engage with candidates directly in their Kormo account dashboard too.
While interviewing more than 1,000 HR professionals, we found them expressing frustrated by the effort and unwieldy nature of communicating with job seekers to inform them about the assessment process before the screening starts. Mr. Md. Merajul Islam Sunny, Manager Talent Acquisition and Employer Branding of Daraz stated, “My team spent a significant amount of time reaching out to the candidates to inform them about the interview process and time. In most cases, it is unlikely that the candidate will pick a phone call in the first call or attempt that we make. Moreover, many of them tend to miss our emails and messages too. In this situation, I found Kormo’s feature to send auto notification to shortlisted candidates about Interview time and date with custom messages quite helpful”
In another interview, the Head of HR, ACI Logistics Limited Mr. Shah Md. Rijvi Rony said, “The Kormo seeker app’s feature to send consistent reminders (app notifications and messages) to job applicants about the interview schedule has eased my team’s daily operations significantly. Sorting the best candidates for Shwapno operations and communicating with them is less of a worry now”.
Sheba XYZ’s Vice President (People & Organization) Aflatun Kaiser places a lot of value on making hiring an efficient business process. He said, “Hiring is expensive specifically when you have only one or two reliable job portals in BD and the market has turned almost monopolistic.
But with Kormo, we have free access to features like auto matching, live seeker database with credentials, quizzes and targeted lessons for shortlisted candidates before they appear for an interview. We have grown to rely on this for our hiring and trust Kormo significantly to match the best candidates for our available roles”.
Mr A K M Atiqur Rahman, the General Manager of Transcom Beverages Limited has a different opinion, “Visibility is a major concern when we frequently hire people for PepsiCo product distribution, I love how the web portal helps us shortlist candidates using AI, tracks the candidate’s end to end application status and overall, acts as an integrated Application Tracking System (ATS)”.
Kormo launched with a mission to benefit and train job seekers back in 2018 and has now scaled up how it serves the employer community and HR professionals in Bangladesh. The service is now available nationwide for both recruiters and job seekers.
Its been insightful to see how the Kormo team have focused their efforts in understanding the needs of the consumers and businesses in the employment space. They have kept investing in creating value from the product they are building and we have seen consistently increasing satisfaction with the service for both employers and job seekers. This focus on understanding the user and generating value first, is how the other core products (Google Maps, YouTube, Gmail) were built and shaped our current digital world. With this kind of approach I am hopeful of Kormo continuing to scale up having a lasting positive impact in the field of hiring and career development in Bangladesh and the world over.
To register for Kormo Early Access Program for Businesses looking to hire, check out kormo.co or express your interest directly in this link
Note on the author: Sifat Abir is a business development lead for Kormo’s local market operations partner in Bangladesh. He is passionate about tech and the recruiting industry
