Changing recruitment to solve social need
Giraffe recruitment agency has made waves and transformed the landscape for job seekers and employers with a fully automated mobile service to recruit medium-skilled workers faster and cheaper than any other employment service. Three skill sets joined forces to create Giraffe - the brainchild of Anish Shivdasani and Shafin Anwarsha, who were joined by Bradley Cowie to establish the agency. Starting out the three founders did not have any recruitment background, but their varied skills were a good fit. When explaining what makes their team powerful, Shivdasani says: “We are a powerful combination because Bradley is an excellent developer and Shafin is strong in analysis and product development, while my background is sales, commission, partnership and fundraising.”
On a mission to solve a social problem
The idea for Giraffe was born from the rising South African unemployment rate, which perpetuates a vicious cycle of poverty. “When we started Giraffe, the initial plan was to try and tackle this problem of unemployment using technology. We thought the best way to do it, was to streamline recruitment by using technology,” Anwarsha says. “Almost every person in the country owns a cellphone, but a huge number of those cellphone owners are unemployed. We realised the potential to tap into that technology and find a solution for unemployment,” says Shivdasani.
Streamlining job search
Giraffe came up with a new recruitment model that focused on a neglected market – the low to medium-scaled jobs. Most recruitment agencies focused on high-end jobs such as managerial and special skills positions. Giraffe’s focus is on the low- to medium-scaled jobs for people earning between R4 000 and R5 000 per month.
Finding a niche
Giraffe streamlined the recruitment process for job hunters and employers. The job hunter can create a simple CV by using a cellphone – a free utility. The App also makes life much easier for employers who can post jobs on the Giraffe website, including where and when they would like to interview the candidates. When employees submit requests for available jobs, an algorithm identifies the most relevant candidates, contacts the employers via SMS and alerts them to the potential candidates and schedules interviews. It takes about five minutes to create a job placement on the website and two days later employers can have a list of people who meet the requirements, selected from the database with more than 100 000 ID-verified, screened candidate CVs. “We have developed technology that enables us to address the need of the lower- to medium-skilled roles, which is where unemployment is greatest. The automated process identifies relevant candidates, contacts them and schedules high volumes of interviews at very low cost. This differentiates us. “Employers use Giraffe to hire medium-skilled workers ten times faster and ten times cheaper than any other agency,” says Shivdasani.
Job-hunting made simple
The Giraffe mobile App works on any cell phone with a browser. “This is very important because most people still don’t have smartphones, especially low- to medium-skilled workers. As long as the phone has a web browser and access to the Internet, the Giraffe App can be used,” says Shivdasani.
Lessons to improve the product
About growth of the business and its challenges, Cowie says: “Initially we started with a completely SMS-based mechanism to collect information for job seekers, which worked. We just couldn’t capture the information sufficiently. We didn’t know enough about our job seekers to find the right jobs. So we swapped over to a mobile site, which was brilliant and gave us immediate results.” To test the mobile App, Shivdasani and Anwarsha visited a number of townships like Thembisa where they spoke to many job seekers, pinpointing first-hand what their needs were. They used the information to create a skeleton App. Within a month job hunters were signing up and Giraffe had modernised and revamped the process of recruitment.
Start-up capital
Shivdasani and Anwarsha personally invested a million rand in the tech start-up. For the first 18 months, while introducing the product to the market, the two did not draw any salaries. Anwarsha says to ensure their vision took off, they subscribed to the philosophy that, “action speaks louder than words”. They needed to prove the concept was viable. “It was a big financial risk. Within 18 months we needed to start up a team, put the product on the market and get people to use the product and eventually raise investment,” Shivdasani says. But before they could put their product on the market, Shivdasani and Anwarsha headhunted Cowie, a strong technical co-founder with software developing skills and database-building knowledge.
International recognition
Shivdasani does not pay much attention to awards and accolades. But when Giraffe won the Seedstars World Award for Best Global Start-up in 2015, he admits it made a huge difference in their business. They were the talk of the town, getting exposure in local and international media. An Omidyar Network investment followed. Omidyar was established by the eBay founder and Silicon Valley tech billionaire Pierre Omidyar. They invest in start-up tech companies. Shivdasani says all of this boosted their credibility.
Advice for aspiring entrepreneurs
Shivdasani taps from his own experience to advise would-be entrepreneurs and to point out the risks involved. “It is important to invest personally in the business, and not rely on investors. This can follow later.” He adds that risk is part of the journey, but it needs to be calculated. Every would-be entrepreneur needs to know the numbers for the business plan really well and should be able to survive at least for a year without any income. He says it is crucial to know the target market. They started talking to potential customers even before their product was fully developed. This helped them to fine-tune, pay attention to detail and address the needs of potential customers.
