Splinter.me is an online platform for job seekers as well as employers, one that provides professional profiles integrated with more than 15 social networks.
According to the founders, Splinter.me was born out of necessity, and has grown to become a solution to job seekers. It promises to reveal one’s professional image to the world, harnessing the benefits of social recruiting.
Here is an interview with Ahmed Mohamed El-Hossaini, the CEO of Splinter.me
They say Start-Ups in Africa are born out of necessity, is that true with Splinter.me?
Yes, actually it started in a very simple way when I think about it, the origin of the idea started after I graduated. I faced the problem of trying to make my CV look good since I had no experience to show off. I knew Java, HTML, flash, and lots of other tools and I had also taken the Master CIW Web Designer certificate but most companies didn’t care for that so I payed a lot of attention on how the CV looked in terms of design so it won’t get overlooked since it was only one page. And ever since I’ve always designed really good and simple CVs.
In 2009 my brother asked me to design his CV since he was thinking about changing jobs. I asked him, don’t you have a LinkedIn account, he said no. So I tried to find my old CV design but I couldn’t and I told, lets try to find a free service that can collect some info from social networks to bootstrap your CV and then we fill some info and perhaps choose from available themes or designs if available. But we couldn’t find such service.
And it hit me, professional profiles lack the social data integration, they lack keeping track of your online social activities that are related to your line of work. And so the idea began to formalize from that point.
That’s really great. So necessity gave birth to Splinter.
Definitely, yeah!
What makes Splinter.me stand out from its competitors?
Well splinter.me main focus is to provide the most complete and rich profiles for professionals by providing professionals with profiles that integrates with more than 15 social network and offering automatic updating of your splinter.me profile without the need to manually add stuff like new job position or new github project for recruiters. We offer a new and powerful way of reaching to talent. We give them the tools to make use of social networks beside just sharing job openings on social networks.
Currently we have the “Splinter Lookup” which is similar to Facebook graph search so you can easily search for talents using natural language expressions like “Splinters who use cakephp and live in Egypt”. And we’re currently working on “Splinter Tracking System” which utilizes the huge amount of data we collect from social networks to give recruiters even more tools to reach out and track splinters.
So to sum up, we’re building a product to cover the entire pipeline of the hiring process with deep integration with social networks and this is one of a kind of all the products out there now
How has the journey been so far?
Bumpy and exciting. We started as a big team of developers; me and other 4 developers who were still college students at the time that was on September 2011. Then we had some disagreement on the vision of the product, and like all start-ups we didn’t manage to find a middle ground. So they left on June 2012, and then I redesigned and rewrote splinter.me to the current version you see now. And in October 2012 I met Adelina Peltea, my business co-founder of splinter.me
We met by chance through Angel.co while she was writing a book about customer acquisition, the book is called “Customer Seduction” during the interview we found that we had very similar ideas and that both of us was looking for the a co-founder to complement the skills and so we decided to join forces.
Briefly, what advice do you have for upcoming start-up founders, especially those in Africa?
Try to bootstrap as long as they can and avoid raising funds cause it’s a waste of precious time.
Do you think Splinter.me beats LinkedIn and other job/ professional sites out there? Kindly let us know what you think?
