Job hunting is a soul-crushing process for applicants – and so is the recruitment process for employers. In Egypt, both applicants and employers have multiple platforms where an enormous amount of CVs are uploaded everyday, leaving employers puzzled with tons of potential interviewees and talents.
In 2015, a breakthrough in the recruitment field occurred when interactive recruitment platform HireHunt penetrated the market to facilitate the process and make it a rather swift and fun one. Instead of standard questions like “What will you bring to the job?”, Hirehunt assesses the actual skills of applicants by asking them a variety of practical, interactive questions that can be answered in written or spoken format.
Business Forward speaks to Basil Fateen, the founder of HireHunt, to find out more about the company’s plans, how it operates and where it is headed.
How does HireHunt work?
HireHunt is an interactive platform that provides assistance to both applicants and employers. Fresh graduates, as they are relatively new to the experience, use it to discover their potential and skills, while employers use it to obtain accurate insights so they don’t have to meet 50 people to get to the one person they need. HireHunt narrows down the number to relevant applicants.
“HireHunt started as a pilot application where it connected applicants with employers,” Fateen points out, adding that it is growing to be a more interactive and smart platform.
Competitors of HireHunt have a business model of two-sided markets and have a massive database of CVs. “The issue with similar models is that there are a lot of CVs and employers in the same place; yet, people are not able to hire. This could have worked 10 years ago, but not today,” Fateen adds.
HierHunt, however, offers two different solutions that work in parallel. On the one hand, it acts as an interviewer for applicants, so it asks questions and assesses them based on every interaction. Accordingly, it knows more about the applicant to give comprehensive feedback and open up more relevant doors to them.
“It gives a very accurate view on what [applicants] can do and starts to offer directions that they may not have considered. Applicants are very biased when it comes to what they think they can do,” Fateen says.
On the other hand, employers start their own interactive process to know what kind of person they need. This also takes place through questions and assessments. After that, the two parties are matched.
HireHunt gives a very accurate view on what applicants can do and starts to offer directions that they may not have considered
How did HireHunt start?
Ahead of developing the recruitment platform, Fateen used to be the manager of a software company and a product consultant.
“When I had to recruit 15-20 people for a technical position within a month or two, I thought it would be an easy process,” Fateen recalls.
However, the process turned out to be everything but easy for Fateen, as he went through a lot of CVs that didn’t give away much information about the applicants, and they all looked the same.
“Applicants include certain buzzwords and keywords in their CVs, and when I met them in real life, I found something different because at the end, a CV is just a template,” Fateen says, adding that “you can have a lot of smart people in one room but if they don’t have the same pace, it becomes explosive.”
The traditional recruitment process is long, inefficient and disappointing. Fateen says that it is irrational to have a process so necessary, yet so slow. “It’s not only essential to companies but to the economy and the generations that are graduating as well.
There are harder scenarios, however. For instance, in the case of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and startups, there is a significant scarcity of applications; let alone that it is very common to receive irrelevant applications.
“I devoted a part of my day to speak with the HR department, managers, fresh graduates and interns, and then I started developing the prototype of HireHunt,” Fateen goes on to say.
Investments, growth and future plans
“At the beginning, I didn’t know how to properly approach the investment part of it. It was a long learning experience but I was very lucky to get out of it with a very good group of angel investors, and then there were a few external investors who were part of the seed round,” Fateen continues.
In September 2016, Cairo Angels sealed an investment deal with HireHunt.
At the investment point, HireHunt had to grow from being a concept to being a business model and that is what they have been working on for the past year.
“We developed different technologies that solve different problems, so last year was not only about growing but also figuring out who we sell our technologies to and how to package them,” Fateen goes on to say.
Regarding long-term plans, Fateen hopes that in the next three to five years, HireHunt will become a global standard in the recruitment process.
“We want to know the repercussions of the right people meeting each other,” Fateen concludes.
HireHunt has been viewed by thousands of employers in the past years, with 20,000 applicants going through interviews.
