Egyptian startup Talents Arena, which has developed an online recruitment platform for technical staff, plans to expand into several African countries this year after building a wide footprint.
Launched in May 2019, Talents Arena helps growing companies find the tech talent they need, connecting them with a large pool of potential employees. These individuals are primarily from Egypt, but Talents Arena is in the process of widening its technical community in the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region.
“We supply hiring companies with interested and qualified technical talents. We have accurate and holistic technical assessment tools that makes candidates selection precise,” Aya Elgebeely, the startup’s founder and chief executive officer (CEO) told Disrupt Africa.
Internal research by Talents Arena found almost 100 million technical vacancies advertised in 2019 alone, with these jobs only filled 20 per cent of the time.
“We believe this gap is due to the mismatch between top tech talents and top tech jobs. Recruitment platforms are not tailored to hire software engineers and developers, who require special handling, and lack accurate technical assessments.that reveal the actual software engineering skills required for a given job,” Elgebeely said.
Talents Arena does all this, but Elgebeely said it was a long process to design the perfect solution.
“It is easy to develop a new web hiring platform and release it, but creating something that actually solves the problem requires lots of research and experiments. With consistent trials and experimentation we will be able to make technical hiring easy for everyone,” she said.
The startup is now operating with 35 registered companies in Egypt, Tunisia, South Africa, Uganda, Germany and the Netherlands, which between them have so far posted 150 vacancies, and plans to expand to more African countries soon, such as Kenya, Senegal, Ethiopia and Botswana, as well as Gulf countries like the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Saudi Arabia.
Making money from subscription packages and commission fees, Talents Arena has generated more than US$65,000 in revenues, but wants funding to take the next steps. Self-funded through its validation phase in 2018, the startup then secured investment from Flat6Labs Cairo and NilePreneurs to the tune of US$100,000.
“We are currently raising a fund of US$2 million that supports our next round of expansion,” said Elgebeely.
