Friday March 29th, 2024
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Egyptian Startup HireHunt Raises Investment And Sets Out to Transform The Way We Apply For A Job

Having just secured an angel investment round led by Cairo Angels, restless entrepreneur Basil Fateen sets off to encourage companies to hire like it's 2016 -not 1984.

Staff Writer

Headhunting wizard and HireHunt founder Basil Fateen has just secured an angel investment led by Cairo Angels along with other prominent investors. Although the amount was not disclosed, the investment network told online platform Wamda that it’s “in the upper range” of the angel investment bracket.

“The investors are pretty incredible; they are heads of companies in very diverse fields like tech and HR, and some of them heads of multinational companies,” says founder Basil Fateen, who had bootstrapped his launch earlier in 2015. “We started to grow faster than we could handle as a small team,” says the entrepreneur, who leads a team of eight at his office in Cairo’s southern district of Maadi. “Within 6 months, we appeared on the radar of USA and European tech companies, so it’s hard to go back from that,” he says.  

Like most entrepreneurs, Fateen’s kick off as an entrepreneur came out of a frustration and questions like why is the hiring process so outdated? Setting off to radically transform corporate recruitment and talent spotting, his startup HireHunt offers gamified, skill-based steps for millennial job seekers to showcase what they do best.    

Fateen moderated a panel at the Teche Summit earlier this year.

The next step, says the 32-year-old entrepreneur, is scaling the business and growing fast. “We were trying to stay under the radar while validating some of the features and the marketing strategy,” he says as he narrates how he tried to limit the market to Egypt and the Middle East until they were ready to grow. “The idea is that we will be ready when the wave comes. We wanted to limit ourselves to testing.”

With fees as low as 50LE per applicant, the platform has already gathered 350 companies ‘hunting’ talents through their gamified activities. “The thing is, recruiters can actually contact people and get to know them as a person before they pay. You pay just to meet them in person but you remove all barriers before then.”

As they gear up to expand globally, the startup is telling the story of their entrepreneurial journey at MBC’s ‘Voices of Hope’  in the Alexandria Library next Thursday, as the network is highlighting the region’s most inspiring stories together with startup hub Injaz.

To find out more about the startup, visit Hirehunt’s website and Facebook page.