A ray of hope for the jobless
April was first undeniably the worst-ever month for Amena Akter, another year honours student of a good college in Dhaka.
Her father and brother were let go from a furniture store near their home found in the capital's Mirpur 11 because of this of the government-enforced shutdown.
The bad news didn't end on her behalf there. She used to earn some money bringing classes at a coaching middle in Mirpur and that as well had to close.
Her relatives was devastated, very worried about how they might pay their house rent and manage different expenses. There seemed to be no expectation at obtaining a job when everybody else was being terminated.
One day when she was scrolling the newsfeed of her Facebook account she came to find out about Kormo, an app-based job marketplace of Google that connects jobseekers to businesses looking for manpower.
She installed the app and found employment advertisement from Meena Bazar. She applied promptly and got a chance for a remote interview.
"On April 29, We installed the iphone app and I got the work offer on that evening," said Amena. "It was a large relief for my children as nowadays I am assisting them with house rent and additional expenses," she said.
Like Amena, supermarket chain Meena Bazar employed a couple of hundred persons through the Kormo app in the last two months.
"In March and April, many of our employees left their work fearing for the Covid-19," Kazi Inam Ahmed, a director of Gemcon Group, which owns Meena Bazar, one of the oldest supermarket chains in the united states, told The Daily Star yesterday.
"With the Kormo application, we're able to meet our demand to get employees," he said.
To handle the Covid-19 circumstances, Kormo introduced two different features - Remote Jobs and Remote Interviews - within their app, allowing those seeking for employment to find critical work-from-home options and safely carry out interviews online.
"Last two months it has been a bit distinct. People are nowadays desperately seeking jobs and companies are wanting to fill up their vacancies," said the official of Google's Kormo.
The official said persons were getting jobs using the Kormo application quicker than ever.
"When the problem was normal there have been things like training. But now there will be no such things," said the state.
According to a recent survey of Brac, around 62 % of low-profits earners lost careers during the shutdown. The pandemic as well left 28 % of the respondents economically inactive, it mentions.
In April alone, Meena Bazar hired a lot more than 400 staff through the lockdown using the Kormo app, their single recruitment channel.
Meena Bazar's move also originates from the latest unprecedented demand for delivery offerings with consumers staying back again inside their homes.
It has increased their have to hire more staff and conduct interviews remotely to handle certain requirements of consumers through the pandemic.
Introduced in 2002, Meena Bazar now provides 16 outlets and directly employs over 1,000 people.
"Nowadays, our expert HR team is dealing with Kormo and conducting remote interviews to recruit persons. This has made the procedure safer for our team and candidates," stated Ahmed Shoyeb, general supervisor at Meena Bazar.
"It's our responsibility as a crucial business to step up at this time. We're positive our partnership with Kormo will enable us to maintain with hiring demands and level our remote workforce quickly."
Since September 2018, when Google launched Kormo, which maintains digital CVs, thousands of men and women found jobs using the app.
The app premiered with a view to helping people in the informal sector, either unemployed or employed at low pay, find jobs. It eyes the 86 per cent of the country's labour drive who are used in the informal sector.
The application has been developed beneath the Google's Area 120 programme, an incubator for new ground breaking ideas inside company.
With free usage of the net portal, Kormo helps its early employers' shortlisted candidates through the use of AI, tracks the candidates' end to end application status and overall, acts as an integrated Applicant Tracking System.
The Kormo app's feature to send regular reminders (app notifications and messages) to job candidates about the interview schedule has eased HR team's daily operations significantly.
