Job site plans to widen reach

AKM Fahim Mashroor, chief executive officer of bdjobs.com, speaks at the 10th anniversary celebration of the job site at Bangabandhu International Conference Centre in Dhaka yesterday.Photo: STAR

Bangladesh's first online job portal bdjobs.com plans to strengthen its efforts to help more local professionals take up international jobs.
Around 150,000 people were employed through the job site over the last 10 years, of whom 1,500 now work abroad.
"But this is not enough," said AKM Fahim Mashroor, the company's chief executive officer, yesterday, marking the site's 10 years of operation.
"We've a huge skilled manpower. But no body works for them because they don't pay like the outbound unskilled workers do," Mashroor said.
He said the world is going to face a crisis of skilled manpower. "And this is an opportunity for Bangladesh," Mashroor said. "To grab an early share of that market, there is no alternative to updating the education system."
Before launching the company, Mashroor pondered over doing something different using internet as a medium in the late 1990s. He said his main area of concern was whether he could generate revenues for Bangladesh, one of the countries that have the lowest internet penetration rate in the world.
But Mashroor succeeded, which stunned many. With a humble beginning from his living room in 2000, bdjobs.com now registers 5,000 employers, and around 30,000 jobseekers visit the site a day.
The company has linked with more than 300 global recruiting agents, through whom it can now supply manpower to the global market free of cost.
Data shows jobless rate increased by 28 percent to 27 lakh in the last three years. A survey of Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics also pointed to the rise of Bangladesh's total labour force by 8.48 percent to 5.37 crore in 2009 from 4.95 crore in 2006. And employment rate increased by 7.59 percent to 5.1 crore from 4.7 crore during the same period.
Mashroor said garment and textile, IT and telecom are the major sectors that contributed much to employment generation in the last few years.
As internet penetration rate is still too low to make people understand online job posting, bdjobs introduced a Bangla version targeting the less-educated.
The company chief also said job search through internet is now popular among the youths. The number of people who used to click bdjobs portal has now risen to 30,000 a day from 1,000 at the beginning, which manifests that the site is user-friendly, said Mashroor.
The job portal's yearly turnover now stands at around Tk 6.5 crore. It holds 90 percent share in the online job portal market.
"We achieved the success because we have localised our products. Employers' increased tech-fond attitude also helped bring more people to the job site."