Kenya’s Duma Works, a startup that provides small and medium-sized enterprises in emerging markets with the recruiting tools they need to source and screen candidates is getting ready to raise its 2nd seed round of between $250,000-500,000USD to change the face of recruiting in Africa and is looking for great partners and investors like you.
Currently working with over 200 employers and 10,000 job candidates in Kenya, Duma Works has made over 4,500 matches using its short code (22131) and WhatsApp (0701060302). The firm is also working on a better screening system that cuts the time to screen in half but has launched its new look site to make job search easy and fast.
Speaking to TechMoran Linus Lennstrand, Duma Works CTO, “Duma Works has traditionally been geared mostly towards job seekers without access to smartphones and internet connection. Therefore, our main communications channel has been SMS. It is a quick and easy way to reach anybody with a basic cell phone and it’s worked great for us. However, during 2014 our focus has broadened and we’ve started to work more and more with a connected demographic, both employers and job seekers. It was obvious that we needed to make efforts to cater to the needs of this group better.”
“There were two main goals with the redesign of the site; easier and more accessible for employers to post jobs and a more attractive way for job seekers with internet access to create and update their Duma profiles, apply for jobs and build their professional networks,” Lennstrand added.
The firm says in the old site, posting a job as an employer was a hassle but the new site puts job posting to the front page and has simplified it.
The social job matching service for emerging markets in November received a $100K grant from the Rockefeller Foundation for bringing transparency to the otherwise murky process of both finding jobs and finding reliable employees in the informal sector by transforming the word-of-mouth hiring system into a network-based platform. This funding will help it expand its operations in Africa.