Fresh grad builds tool that lets job seekers compare salary offers with market rates

Fresh out of the National University of Singapore with a data science degree in May 2025, Luqman Naqib spent nine months sending out about 300 job applications.

- Sherlyn Sim

After repeated rejections, an offer arrived. The tech role paid $3,500 a month — well below the $5,000 median gross salary for graduates from his course, according to the latest Graduate Employment Survey at the time.

The 25-year-old was tempted to accept it. With no guarantee another offer would come, he faced a simple question: Was the salary fair?

To benchmark the offer, he turned to friends and former coursemates. What he found surprised him.

“They were getting offers below what they expected too,” Luqman told The Straits Times.

“And I have some very smart, very hardworking coursemates, but even they didn’t negotiate their salary. They took any offer that came, even though they did not like the job or their salary. It felt like they were undervaluing their skill set and worth.”

The experience inspired Luqman, now an artificial intelligence engineer at a health-tech start-up, to build Lowball (sglowball.vercel.app). It is a website designed to help job seekers determine whether they are being “lowballed” - a term which describes being offered a salary significantly below the current market rate for similar roles.

Over two weekends in March, he gathered thousands of listings scraped from Singapore’s MyCareersFuture portal.

The tool indexes more than 200,000 job postings, allowing users to benchmark an offer against similar roles. He hopes it will address what he sees as a lack of transparent, real-time salary information for job seekers.