Shohayota

Shohayota  connects students with part-time jobs, internships, and full-time entry-level jobs for recent grads. Businesses post a job to a targeted audience of students at any Bangladesh college or university where students can browse through jobs and apply for free. 

Students fill out a profile including their previous employment, academic achievements, along with additional information such as hobbies or recreational activities. Once an employer sets up their company profile they can post-employment or internship opportunities. The qualifications they are seeking can be specific or vague but only students that meet those qualifications will be able to view the listing. Our Advance AI , filtering system and our video screening of candidate  assures employer gets the best-shortlisted candidate . 

When a job matching their criteria the Shortlisted, students get a notification and ready for the employer interview.

There is no effective, trusted way for youth of Bangladesh to find jobs that interest them online in one platform. 23% of startups fail because of the wrong team while Dhaka Tribune says around  4.4 million youth face unemployment in Bangladesh but are enrolled in Universities vying for work experience and skill building. World Vision says 72% of the youth population of Bangladesh are interested in receiving vocational training to help them gain employment.

Linkedin recruitment has mostly Professionals dominating and if vacancy is there (5 years minimum experience is needed to even apply) Similarly, Emerging startups find it hard to recruit creative driven talent. 

The State of Talent Acquisition in India 2018 report by HR tech firm Mettl reveals that over 85 percent of business organizations in South Asia list ‘acquiring good talent’ as one of its top three challenges. The problem is particularly pressing, where close to 90 percent of businesses admit to facing “a massive shortage of high-skilled, mid-level talent”.

Our target audience for candidates is anyone aged from 14-29 (Millennials and Generation Z) in need of entry level jobs or internships in Bangladesh with a priority on girls and women. Currently, approximately 4.4 million youth face unemployment in Bangladesh but are enrolled in Universities.

Our target market for Employers are startups and Small Medium Enterprises (SME).

Shohayota is 'Help' or 'Assist' in Bangla. The brand name was inspired by our desire and vision to build solutions that will effectively help the citizens of Bangladesh. We want to create solutions that will utilize technology to remove various barriers that exists in Bangladesh.

Youth are the pillar of our future and we need to make sure that these Youth have access to all opportunities and are never deprived of any. We want to Help them reach and live their potential, achieve their career goals. By bridging the gap for the youth, Shohayota is taking a huge step towards achieving our dream of a more connected and a better Bangladesh.

We have built the website on LAMP framework. The website is powered by Apache servers. If required in future, the technology stack will be adopted accordingly to meet future demands. In order for this to work, we have created two channels within the platform. The first channel belongs to a hiring manager where the manager creates a specific job, allocates the engagement period. The next channel belongs to potential talents. The talent will apply to get enrolled to the platform and will be going through a series of aptitude and behavioral tests. If they are able to score above a certain threshold (To be determined), they will be enrolled to the platform and will have access to all available jobs. They can then just submit application for a job which suits their background and education by the click of a button. It is then upto us to determine the suitability of a student for a specific role. After going through the series of applications made, we will forward a number of shortlisted applicants to the hiring manager for a potential final interview. Once the final interview is conducted, based on feedbacks from the hiring managers, we will make offers to the most suitable candidate. During the duration of their engagement, they will be employed under Shohayota working as a contracting intern/employee for our client.

Students in Bangladesh often miss out on the opportunities to get work experience while studying because of the limited number of channels available to them. Added to that, the channels used now are not heavily focused on getting improving a students skill-sets, rather servers as a generic medium to post jobs. This results with a lot of students missing out on opportunities due to the noise from these mediums. Furthermore, the noise created by huge number of applications for a specific role increases screening times on HR personnel. 

We want to tackle this issue by creating an online job platform which serves as a medium for qualified students to browse and apply for jobs. By creating a platform which serves to students only, we are removing the noise and making sure it is the Go To platform for students. Furthermore, every single student registered within our platform will be going through a rigorous screening process. This means, once a student applies they are already vetted as a top talent and only needs to go through a single final interview with the hiring manager. This will save huge amount of time as HR personnel belonging to companies will not have to worry about cumbersome application screening. 

These pool of talent is available to any hiring manager for short term project based engagements to long term engagements without having to go through a hiring process.

85 percent of business organizations in South Asia list ‘acquiring good talent’ as one of its top three challenges. 4.4 million youth face unemployment in Bangladesh but are enrolled in Universities. Companies are unable to find the right talent for their desired position and Candidates are unable to bridge the skill gap or the true desired job they are interested in. 

This is where we bridge the gap. 

As a result, businesses will be saving money, have access to quality talents and the most important of all, students will have a pool of jobs without having to worry about competition and negligence. We also make sure the salary available to students is same regardless of the job they get engaged to. We will also make sure candidates that were determined not suitable for a specific role are retained within the platform by constantly communicating with them about their shortcomings and potential opportunities to build up their skills which allow them to secure a role.

2.2 million youth have access to the internet today while 4.4 Million are unemployed, and whoever we reach, not all of them will actually join and use our platform. In the first year, we expect to reach 25% of these people and 10% of those people will actually join the platform and use. Then the next year, with more marketing, we expect to reach 30% of the unemployed youth and 17% will use. Year on year these numbers will increase as the platform will have more trust.

Within a year we would like to:

-quickly transition to mobile platform and upgrade our app

-develop algorithm, ways to assess and verify skills online and patent technology,

-develop the e learning platform

- Open API for private video interview technology so corporate can use to reduce time to recruit skill jobs

-Collect Revenue from our own skills and professional training platform as a subscription member. Candidate can get access to Mentor and Coach of all professions as well.

In 2-5 years:

In terms of future technology implementation, we will be powering our website with either JavaScript based React/Node.js or Python Flask. Our decision to develop with php was important to keep initial costs low in first few years. This also means keeping the technical team expenses minimum during the initial post launch period. The estimates are further detailed in the estimates. We are also developing a really efficient aptitude test platform which will be used to filter students before enrolling them to Shohayota. This platform will be available to hiring managers at no extra cost when compared to other competitive aptitude test platforms like SHL. The tests are packaged when employers sign up with us for a job.

-Have a Creative professional team lead for increasing appeal of jobs

-Expand to other districts

-Focus on upgrading automation tools, AI tools, HR Tech tools for high scaling

-To increase ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue) and to reduce Paid Customer Acquisition cost.

-Create Graduate recruitment programs for startup companies

-Gaining the trust of the companies and young applicants and keeping their trust in a sustainable manner

-Lack of funding to use Paid Channels to access further users

-Lack of legal support available for tax and even if it is available, its a long process

-Low amount of young talents want to join a startup company as their is a high risk

-Lack of clear understanding from SME companies as to what kind of skilled fresh grad they are looking for

- Lack of understanding of passion and drive youth have for a certain industry due to lack of opportunities from a young age

-Giveaways of products/gifts to students from companies that partner with us (T-shirts and usable goods)

-University career placements center affiliations and partnerships

-Hire students in Campus Ambassador programs for 3 months each to increase our talent pool and campus presence in each quarter

-Have students participate in our blog to write about career challenges and solutions to keep up with the requirements of what skills are needed to get jobs in their sector

-Partner with Facebook groups where conversations about jobs happen and promote our platform

-Partner with startup blogs and other free online media/channels

2 co founders part time

1 co founder full time

Our values are what makes us different; a mindset that drives our culture and performance. Be honest, Believe in yourself, Take Responsibility, Be the Initiator, Never settle.

The pros? All work and no play makes us feel burnt out. 

We’re a close group of friends and brothers, not just colleagues. We love rewarding progress and provide responsibility and challenge week in and out.

Mohammad Jahin Showic , Co- Founder,

BBA, Concentration in Marketing, NSU

Previously Worked as Co-founder for Youth Thinkers Society Bangladesh for 5 years, Co-founder for Project RohingyaNOW  for 1 year, Youth Counselor and Moderator for 6 years in Quantum Foundation, Model UN and Public speaking veteran in 75+ Conferences across the world. 

Mostaqim Morshed, Co- Founder,

Master of Information Technology, The University of New South Wales Bachelor of Information Technology - International Islamic University Malaysia Working currently as a Consultant for a Big 4 consulting company. Previously worked in the Information and Data space with the New South Wales Government - Department of Education, Rio Tinto Australia and Schlumberger Malaysia.

Tamim Ahmed, Co- Founder,

Experienced Founder with a demonstrated history of working in the Marketing & Advertising industry. Skilled in Sales, Data Analysis, Marketing Strategy, Digital Illustration, Data Processing , Wordpress Google Services, and Python. A strong business development professional with growth hacking in Tec Field. Previously Worked as UI/UX designer for Showcase Magazine, zoop, Co-founder at Dutytaker  for 1 year which help company digitally transform their business, Content Moderator for 2 years in DoorDash USA.

Shohayota business model is pay per post model - our revenue comes from employers. Companies post Jobs and internships for freshers or University students. We will operate on a pay per post model with the startup companies. Once a candidate is selected and finalized, only then we will charge a small service fee for our operational costs. We believe this is better for our long term success because it is fair, They pay only when we give them the top candidates to select from and when the candidate is finalized.

We provide companies a way to stand out on the web site with a paid service for corporate advertising on our website. Employers sponsor the post for the perfect candidate also this increase the visibility above general search results. For employers, we built this pay per post pricing model.

Short term?

In our first quarter, we are going to operate by generating small service revenue regularly from Companies one a per internship/job basis. We are also targeting different startup competitions and angel investors to run the business for our second quarter and third quarter. We are also open for Corporate advertising on our website.

Long Term?

-Revenue from connecting online training programs like Coursera/EDx/ Brac and other Potential best suited trainings for each job sector. We will also connect students with our own soft skills and professional training platform in future as a subscription member. Candidate can get access to Mentor and Coach of all profession. 

-Create Graduate programs for startup companies

Access to markets, Funding, Strategic and operational support, Mentor ship,