Sitting in Hall 2 of the Bangladesh-China Friendship Conference Centre, waiting for his candidates to take interview, Ahsanul Islam, director of Digital Group, said yesterday: "I scheduled only three hours for these interviews. Now I've been waiting for an hour and I haven't seen a single applicant. This isn't working."

Like 30 other companies, Islam paid Tk 5,000 to take part in the IT job fair organised by bdjobs.com. It was supposed to be a highlight of this year's software fair, the largest of its kind in Bangladesh. In fact, with 4,000 CVs handed in for the 79 IT jobs on offer the numbers were so impressive and bdjobs.com could not handle them.

What went wrong? Before the SoftExpo2005, employers looking for IT staff submitted their job descriptions. For the first two days bdjobs.com posted job ads on PCs at the fair and gathered CVs. Wednesday and Thursday (today), the final days of the SoftExpo, were scheduled for interviews with suitable candidates.

"The problem was that we did not account enough time to evaluate all the CVs and applications," said Fahim Mashroor, bdjobs.com CEO. His staff scanned CVs all the night on Tuesday and selected suitable candidates for interviews, but failed to inform them about their appointments in time. "Some people only left their email addresses," Mashroor explained, "If they don't check their mails regularly then we can't reach them."

On the next table, Fuad Bashar, director of Mitra Association, sighed and said: "I think the Tk 5,000 we paid was a waste of money. Our regular posting on the web edition of bdjobs.com was much more successful." He said the CVs he had received during the IT fair were not as interesting as the ones he had received after posting the job description on the web site. Bashar is looking for three junior programmers to extend his team, currently working on outsourcing projects for the US.

"Next time round I'll just use the web. It was a nice idea, but it doesn't work", Bashar summarised his feelings.

Mashroor from bdjops.com understood the disappointment of the employers. "We realise we have just scheduled too little time to do the job properly. We've learnt our lesson for the next year."

bdjobs.com was the first job web site in the country. The company started out with just two computers and three employees in 2000. Today 25 employees work for the site and 20,000 people have successfully found jobs using the service.

Looking at these numbers, the IT job fair at the SoftwareExpo2005 will only mean a minor setback for a surging online business.