30,000 jobs made possible with Shomvob
A large number of young men and women in Bangladesh struggle with unemployment after finishing their education. According to the Labour Force Survey 2024 by the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS), there are 2.624 million unemployed people in the country. Among them, 885,000 hold bachelor’s degrees. Educated youth make up the majority of the unemployed—one in every three jobless individuals is a graduate.
In Bangladesh, it is relatively easier for physicians or engineers to find jobs, but not so for blue-collar and entry-level “silver-collar” workers such as drivers, restaurant staff, and data-entry operators. The availability of suitable jobs is limited, and opportunities for skill development are scarce. With this reality in mind, three young entrepreneurs founded a job-search support startup in 2022—named “Shomvob” (Possible).
Recently, Shomvob made it to the “Forbes Asia 100 to Watch 2025” list.
The Sombhob app runs on machine learning and artificial intelligence technology, developed entirely in-house. It has been downloaded over 2 million times from the Google Play Store and has processed more than 6 million job applications. Around 300,000 job seekers use the app every month. So far, more than 30,000 candidates have secured jobs through Sombhob—about 10,000 of them women.
Over 2,000 companies currently use Sombhob’s services, including Foodpanda, Pathao, Berger, Singer, KFC, and SSL Commerz.
Sombhob’s founder and CEO Rifad Hossain completed his degree in Electrical and Electronic Engineering (EEE) from the Islamic University of Technology (IUT) in 2015 and worked for several multinational companies for seven years before launching the startup in a small 150-square-foot room in Dhaka’s Baridhara DOHS in 2022.
To build the app, he teamed up with co-founder and CTO Nakib Mohammad Faiyaz, an EEE graduate from BUET who previously worked on Grameenphone’s “MyGP” app, and co-founder and COO Hasibur Rahman, a business graduate from North South University.
The three began the venture together, but today, Sombhob has 52 employees working from a 4,000-square-foot office in Baridhara. In 2022, they secured a $300,000 investment from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, on the condition that they would help 10,000 women find employment by 2025.
In the first three months, only 100 people signed up. Now, the app has 1.8 million registered job seekers. In May this year, they raised $1 million in pre-seed funding led by Singapore-based venture capital firm Cocoon Capital, along with another $700,000 from two European venture capital firms—bringing total foreign investment to $2 million. The company has been profitable for the past six months.
“Around 700,000 businesses in Bangladesh—small, medium, and large—struggle to find the right employees,” CEO Rifad Hossain told Prothom Alo.
"Paperwork and complicated hiring processes often prevent the right talent from reaching the right place, cutting productivity by up to 30 per cent. Many job seekers turn to brokers out of frustration. That’s why we created this platform—to simplify hiring and reduce cost and time. Registration is completely free for job seekers. About 70 per cent of our users are from Dhaka, and the rest are from Khulna, Chattogram, and Kushtia,” Rifad said.
What services does Sombhob offer?
Sombhob operates as a B2B job-tech and HR-tech platform, providing recruitment and human resource management services for businesses. Job seekers can also create digital professional profiles, apply directly for jobs free of charge, and receive feedback on why they weren’t selected.
The platform offers free skill development courses based on individual needs, complete with certification upon completion.
Sombhob assists private companies with candidate assessment, recruitment, and workforce management, services that usually require significant costs. The startup also collaborates with international development partners—including the Gates Foundation, UNICEF, Swisscontact, and Roots of Impact—to enhance job seekers’ skills.
Employers can post job ads through Sombhob for a monthly fee of Tk 6,000. When a candidate gets hired, the company pays Sombhob a service charge equivalent to 80–100 per cent of the employee’s first month’s salary. For payroll management, the platform charges Tk 800–1,200 per employee.
Looking ahead, CEO Rifad Hossain said, “We plan to start exporting Bangladeshi manpower to Middle Eastern countries from next year. We aim to make the entire migration process transparent, technology-driven, and cost-efficient. Within the next three years, we plan to expand our services to all 64 districts of Bangladesh.”