Arabnet Arabnet

Leading Middle East online recruitment services Basharjobs and CareerMidEast have merged together to become Wuzzuf.com. The deal will be bringing together the former’s job matching algorithm and the latter’s 200,000+ profiles in a move that puts Wuzzuf in a favorable position to fight off the competition, but apparently there’s more to it as CEO Muhammad Algarhy explained to me.

“CareerMidEast is one of the earliest online recruitment tools available and possesses one of the richest databases, but uses an old and outdated system. BasharJobs on the other hand is quite recent but boasts one of the most up-to-date web technologies for online recruitment. We thought why not join the two.”

BasharJobs entered the online recruitment space back in 2009 with an algorithm based screening technology that promised to remove the hassle from recruitment. “The contradiction that we saw before launching BasharJobs was that while online recruitment was cheaper than its offline alternative, only 7% of the process was done online,” explains Muhammad. The reason for this he believes was because even online recruitment came with a hassle. What most online recruitment agencies did was basically take the offline recruitment procedure online without a single enhancement. “Too many applications to sift through and exaggerated claims pushed companies away. The question we asked ourselves then was can we develop a simpler method while keeping the costs low enough.”

That formula became the driving force behind BasharJobs’ focus. The company developed a screening process that ensures credibility along with an algorithm that simplifies matching companies with job seekers. And that technology will now sit on top of one of the most comprehensive databases for recruitment in the region. That should be the envy of any recruitment service competing in an already crowded space. But it’s not just about that.

The online recruitment space in the Middle East has its share of global and regional players with websites like Bayt.com, Laimoon, and Monster. Muhammed does not seem to worry much about the competition though. “We won’t be competing, we’re positioning ourselves in a different way,” he remarked, “We want to convince the market of the value of online and increase the size of the pie.”

Take LinkedIn for example, it is an invaluable tool for recruiters. They do not compete with other recruitment services however because they positioned themselves as a social network for professionals and managed to avoid the confrontation he concluded.

Check out BasharJobs Startup Demo pitch at ArabNet Cairo 2011