South African mobile recruitment platform Giraffe has been acquired by the Harambee Youth Employment Accelerator, with the startup’s existing base of jobseekers and employers to be invited to join the SA Youth Initiative.
Founded in 2015, Giraffe is a fully-automated, low-cost recruitment agency service operating across South Africa and focusing on medium-skilled jobs such as call centre, field sales, customer service and retail.
The startup’s mobile app enables jobseekers to make a CV on their phone for free, take educational courses and apply for jobs, and is zero-rated on all major mobile networks. For employers, Giraffe automatically screens candidates based on their criteria and enables them to listen to candidate voice clips before deciding to interview and hire them.
Since launching Giraffe has won the global Seedstars World competition, and raised funding from Omidyar Network, FirstRand’s Vumela fund, UNICEF, Forever Young Capital and Catapult Trust. To date it has attracted over one million jobseekers and thousands of employers, connecting around 500,000 work-seekers with potential job opportunities.
As such, Giraffe’s platform was considered a natural fit for the Harambee Youth Employment Accelerator, which aims to scale up youth employment efforts in South Africa and enable both jobseekers and employers to engage and interact in a low cost, self-service manner.
“We are thrilled to be integrating our platform with Harambee as part of the SA Youth initiative – which is by far the largest ever coordinated effort to tackle the scourge of youth unemployment in South Africa. Together with Harambee, Giraffe will be able to impact far more young people and businesses than we could have done alone,” said Giraffe chief executive officer (CEO) Anish Shivdasani.
“We have always applauded Giraffe’s focus on inclusion and access in their product design and are thrilled to leverage this as we kick off Youth Month and expand the reach of the SA Youth platform,” said Harambee CEO Maryana Iskander.
