Employment platform success for 2CVs
There is no doubt that with the increasing
willingness of people to move to other countries for work, plus the
continuous search of companies for talent, employment platforms are
now a successful, albeit rare, business model in the Arab
world.
“I’ve lived in Australia my entire
life and I noticed that oil and gas companies in the GCC only seek
one employment agency in Australia to recruit their staff,” says
Alaa Eddine El Jaafari, founder of recruitment site 2CVS.com.
“This made me confused, especially since there are many employment
agencies in Australia specialized in various fields like
healthcare, IT, or accounting.”
A bridge between companies
and employment agencies
After doing some research El Jaafari
found that companies don’t like the logistics required to deal with
multiple agencies. That’s when El Jaafari decided to establish a
company that connects employers with employment agencies in an easy
and simple manner. The website is basically “a network of local and
global employment agencies, while helping employers in the GCC hire
professionals from all over the world.”
Born out of desire to change his own
career path El Jaafari launched the site out of the Silicon
Oasis Founders (SOF) headquarters in Dubai in January
2014. As well as the DSO, which he believes to be his most
significant supporter, he has a team that includes two employees –
a sales consultant and a customer relationship director, plus an
advisory board made up of professionals in the
field.
So how does 2CVS help employers find
the right talents in an easy and fast way? El Jaafari says that
when employers look for employees, they have two
options – either look through employment sites, but that means
having to do all the work themselves, trawling thousands of cvs
from multiple agencies; or they can go to employment agencies, but
that leads to ‘which agency is best?’
With a single contract El Jaafari
believes he is offering the perfect solution. Employers can specify
what exactly they’re looking for and where they want to look – the
platform can connect them to all agencies on their books, those
agencies then in turn send back their two most appropriate
CVs.
One contract = bigger
employment opportunities
El Jaafari believes that one of the
most important advantages of his company is their value for money.
In some countries an employment agency can charge an employer
looking for staff the equivalent of a [new employee] month’s
salary. 2CVs charges a fixed amount, taking commission, with the
rest going to the employment agency used.
El Jaafari emphasizes that the
selection of employment agencies follows a very rigorous set of
criteria, and the company even has a performance monitoring system.
However, he adds, the company only deals with small and medium
sized employment agencies because they offer high quality services
at low prices.
Since their creation they have
amassed a total of 150 agencies from all over the world including
Australia, India, Malaysia, Singapore, Spain, France, Italy, and
the UK.
As for customers, El Jaafari reveals a few major ones: the
Dr. Sulaiman Al Habib Medical Center in
Dubai Healthcare City, Abu Dhabi
National Oil Company (ADNOC), a law firm in Dubai, and
various startups such us Telr,the Silicon Oasis, and a construction firm in
KSA.
When it comes to competition El
Jaafari believes that it might come from other employment agencies
that are not part of their network, he also thinks they might have
conflicting interest with sites like LinkedIn or
bayt.com.
Some companies, he says, have even
gone so far as to imitate his concept – in India there is a
3CVs. “I
think it is one of the investors, or people who were there during
our funding sessions, especially as I didn’t talk a lot about my
idea before launching it.”
Quick
monetization
When it comes to funding of 2CVs El
Jaafari recounted for Wamda the funny incident that led to his
partnership with the Silicon Oasis Founders. “When I was in
Australia, I wanted to learn about licenses and their costs, and I
dialled the wrong number. SOF’s manager told me I had the wrong
number and that they didn’t handle licenses or investment,” he
says. “And so I told him about my idea, and after three months of
discussions, and meetings, I entered the SOF program and got my
first round of funding.”
While the founder wouldn’t reveal
the amount he received he did say it was between $80,000 and
$150,000. In return, SOF got a share in the company. When El
Jaafari sought a second round of funding six months ago he found
another investor, anonymous this time, who also gained a share in
the company.
El Jaafari, however, asserts that
2CVs has started “generating profits that we weren’t expecting. The
company is making money and the business is getting better,”
adding, “we stopped the sales process four months ago because we
had attracted more customers than we could
handle.”
Given that the company offers B2B
services, he did not need to launch any marketing or sales
campaign, explaining, “I only took part last year in the HR Summit
Expo in Dubai, which was the main source of my
customers.”
Within almost a year, 2CVs succeeded
in many ways, however, the road was bumpy. El Jaafari believes that
the main challenges he faced were building a website that meets the
needs of employers and employment agencies alike, and understanding
their needs even though he wasn’t an expert in the field. He adds
that finding a web design agency wasn’t easy, especially when he
was looking for one that gets the mentality of startups
too.
Being an entrepreneur is also
exhausting. “You have to wear different hats and play the roles of
an accountant, marketing officer, designer, etc. as well as your
main job as a CEO who sets the company’s strategy and monitors its
performance.”
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