Kibbi wants to redefine the job search experience for newcomers

When Hong Phuc Nguyen migrated to Canada in 2020, she struggled to work through the maze of barriers to find work in this country.

She quickly realized she was not alone.

Realizing the challenges that newcomers in particular have with finding jobs, she created an app with a team of fellow immigrants, hoping to be part of the solution.

Kibbi is a hyperlocal social platform that makes it easy for entry-level and hourly job seekers to directly connect with businesses to fill both long- and short-term local staffing needs in real-time.

“Kibbi is on a mission to redefine the job search experience for entry-level job seekers, many of whom are newcomers and young people. To do so would help businesses improve the success rate of their ‘help wanted’ listings by connecting them with the underemployed communities and nearby job seekers,” she says.

Nguyen says the name for the company comes from the word “kibbutz,” which identifies communal settlement, or community, in Hebrew.

When Nguyen came to Calgary at the peak of COVID a couple of years ago, she struggled to find a job. She had a bachelor of commerce from Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, and a master of business administration (MBA) with distinction and scholarship from the University of Hong Kong—she was the first and still the only Vietnamese candidate in the program.

Doing some volunteer work, she witnessed immigrants in Calgary struggling to find jobs, even at the peak of the labour shortage.

She founded Kibbi in 2021 as an initiative to help her non-profit organization's members, Vietnamese newcomers, find jobs in Calgary despite the peak of a labour shortage during COVID-19.

“We created a multilingual platform that helped newcomers do two things: first is to find that first job very fast in their local community to settle in the new country, and also from there exploring the upskilling and re-skilling resources near them,” she says. “So they can gradually establish their network, build confidence to learn English and readily upskill to maximize their contributions to their host country.

“Local business can tap into the new labour workforce very easily… I believe that integrating the new Canadian into the local workforce is the easiest way to support them, because the reality is not every doctor can be a doctor again. Now if that’s the case, you can see what are the jobs you can start with to survive.”

Nguyen says the app is available across Canada.

She says the concept of Kibbi is about lowering barriers to work for career starters by making the job market more inclusive and accessible.

Location and proximity to jobs is a focus, and the app lists jobs visually via a map to provide equal visibility for all opportunities from both big and small businesses. A newcomer can now skip a one-hour bus ride to work and apply to businesses in their neighbourhood, a single mom can now see who is hiring near a daycare, and youth can easily apply for part-time jobs near school and home.

Nguyen says Kibbi is also the first multilingual job portal on the market. It translates job listings into various languages and notifies the English fluency required for each job, giving newcomers, especially basic English speakers, the confidence to apply and enter the workforce.

Nguyen said the app is validated by the most prominent newcomer non-profit organizations and many ethnic communities in Alberta.