Google Kormo Jobs

» see kormo.app as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

kormo never reached me. it was a blue-collar jobs app for south asia, dhaka first and jakarta a few months later. in 2018 i was 34 in ankara, working as a computer engineer on contracts that never went through a job marketplace. kormo's actual user was somebody making three dollars a day looking for a delivery shift or a security guard slot, the informal sector that google's next billion users org had been studying as a product surface since around 2016.

the app launched out of area 120 in september 2018 as a dhaka-only product, the word kormo means "work" in bengali. it ran on android only, the design was a card stack of nearby openings with the salary on the front and a one-tap apply button on the back. employers paid nothing. the value to google was the user behavior data, the value to the user was a way to find a paid shift without going through a labor broker who took a cut. for whatever reason it landed harder than the area 120 norm.

by march 2019 google moved kormo out of area 120 and into next billion users proper. the indonesian launch happened that month with a jakarta-first rollout. india had to wait until august 2020 because the indian jobs market was already crowded with naukri and apna under heavy local funding (close enough). by 2021 the user base across the three markets had reached about 4.5 million seekers. employers on the platform included flipkart and dunzo plus a long tail of regional retail and delivery chains.

~ the record ~

~ who it was for ~

this part you had to be in dhaka or jakarta for, and i was not. honestly, the user was the informal sector worker that the existing jobs sites did not bother indexing. naukri and indeed had been built around the formal-sector cv with a college degree on it. kormo's flow assumed the user did not have a cv and did not have a desktop computer. you signed up with your phone number, you filled in a short profile by tapping through cards, you swiped through nearby shifts. the simplicity was the whole product.

the cultural moment of kormo in bangladesh was real for a year or two. dhaka tribune ran a long piece in 2020 about how the app had pulled a generation of cycle-rickshaw drivers and tea-stall workers into the formal jobs economy. for some reason google ran a billboard campaign in dhaka during the 2019 cricket world cup, kormo logos went up next to grameenphone and pathao branding across the city. the product had genuine cultural weight in its home market, the kind area 120 incubator products almost never reach.

~ the next chapter ~

the shutdown on june 30 2022 came in an email to existing users in may 2022 with a one-month wind-down window (close enough). google did not announce a reason. dhaka tribune wrote that the cause was "google's evolving strategy" without quoting anyone by name. the killedbygoogle entry locked the cause to the broader next billion users org being broken up and its emerging-markets app portfolio being either folded into other google products or shut down outright.

the kormo data did not migrate anywhere. user accounts were deleted at the june 30 cut-off and the employer side of the platform was told to use the standard google for jobs search hook on the regular google.com flow. the bangladeshi tech press treated it as a real loss, the indian press treated it as a footnote, the indonesian press fell somewhere in between. there is no replacement, anyway. the user that kormo was built for is back in the labor-broker funnel.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »