CEO of Shaghalni Omar Khalifa said the company seeks to differentiate from competitor employment websites by providing vacancies in untraditional ways.
It seeks to become a platform that presents workers in different careers to the companies looking for employees in specific fields, particularly in the craft and technical feilds, such as drivers, labourers, and other kinds of employees.
Omar said the idea for the platform is based on enabling job seekers to register their data, while the employers look for these jobseekers through Shaghalni, which facilitates linking the job seekers to the companies offering vacancies.
As for the mechanisms of making profit through the project, Omar said currently the company is not focusing on making profits, noting that this will come later on by increasing the number of users.
However, the company has identified two mechanisms for making profits. The first is posting advertisements on the website, using the visiting rates, while the second is limiting the number of job seekers the employers can employ through the platform and making them pay simple annual fees to employ more jobseekers.
Omar said about 900 companies have registered to look through the jobseekers’ profiles, noting that he aims to increase them to 10,000 in 2016. There are 10,000 users registered on the website and the company targets increasing them to 50,000 by the end of 2016.
There are 3,000 job opportunities offered through Shaghalni, although the website was officially launched in July 2015. The company targets increasing its growth rate to 150% in 2016.
The users living in Cairo make up approximately 30% of the platform’s database, Omar said, while the rest are distributed in other governorates. The company currently depends on the conferences and marketing through the internet to promote its services, aiming to gain fame and attract more users.
Shaghalni targets expanding in the Sudanese markets and the markets of the Gulf countries, especially in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Kuwait. As for using the specialised investment funds, Omar said he does not currently need to expand abroad, especially since the company just started to make profits.
As for the competition in the presence of pioneer platforms in the field of recruitment, he said the market is large and can accommodate many platforms under the youth’s need for jobs. Shaghalni targets a specific type of jobseeker that the other platforms do not focus on: blue-collar workers.
Omar believes the government’s bureaucracy is one of the most important challenges the startups and entrepreneurship sector is facing, as well as the unclear vision regarding tax laws and the investment climate. He demanded a specific mechanism for the imposed taxes, to be maintained for long periods so the investor is not surprised that new taxes were imposed after planning their business.
