NUS Grad Builds AI Tool to Help Job Seekers Spot Lowball Salary Offers
Source: The Straits Times
An NUS data science grad built Lowball, an AI tool that benchmarks salary offers against 200,000+ MyCareersFuture job listings after he was offered S$3,500 — well below the S$5,000 median for his course.
A National University of Singapore data science graduate has built an AI-powered tool called Lowball that indexes over 200,000 job postings from Singapore's MyCareersFuture portal to help job seekers benchmark salary offers against market rates. The tool was created by Luqman Naqib after he was offered S$3,500 a month for a tech role — well below the S$5,000 median for his NUS data science cohort, according to the university's Graduate Employment Survey.
Lowball scrapes job listings from the government's MyCareersFuture platform and uses AI to match salary offers against similar roles, taking into account job title, industry, experience level, and skills requirements. The website, hosted at sglowball.vercel.app, was built over two weekends and has already attracted attention from fresh graduates frustrated by opaque salary negotiations. Luqman says he built it because salary talk is still taboo in Singapore, but younger workers increasingly want transparency.
The timing is telling. Singapore's nominal wage growth slowed to 4.9% in 2025 from 5.6% in 2024, and only 72.4% of firms reported wage increases — down from 78.3%, according to MOM data. Recruitment experts quoted in the article note that employers in sectors with large talent pools, including IT, are increasingly offering the lower end of their salary bands, especially to candidates who are currently unemployed. Some job seekers are accepting offers 10 to 20% below their previous salaries due to restructuring fears. In AI and data centre roles specifically, internal salary benchmarks haven't kept pace with rapidly rising market expectations.
Why it matters for Singapore: Lowball is more than a side project — it's a practical example of how AI can address a real information asymmetry in Singapore's labour market. With the government pushing SkillsFuture and career conversion programmes, tools that give workers better data about their market value could help close the gap between what employers offer and what roles are actually worth. For a city-state that talks constantly about upskilling and wage growth, having AI-powered salary transparency might be exactly the kind of nudge the market needs.