The Giraffe recruitment platform is moving to the South Africa Youth National Initiative managed by Harambee Youth Employment Accelerator. Giraffe’s existing base of jobseekers will join the initiative for the rest of June, as part of the transfer to Harambee.
Giraffe, founded in 2015, is an automated job matching platform focusing on entry-level and mid-skill jobs. The firm’s mobile app enables jobseekers to make a CV on their cellphone for free, take educational courses and apply for jobs, and is zero-rated on all major cellphone networks.
For employers, Giraffe automatically screens candidates based on their criteria and enables them to listen to candidate voice clips before deciding to interview and hire them.
Since launching Giraffe has won the Seedstars World award for best startup and raised funding from Silicon Valley VC Omidyar Network, FirstRand’s Vumela fund, UNICEF, Forever Young Capital, and Catapult Trust. To date Giraffe has attracted over 1 million job seekers and thousands of employers, connecting around half a million work seekers with potential job opportunities.
As such, Giraffe’s platform is a natural fit for the Harambee Youth Employment Accelerator, which aims to scale up youth employment efforts in South Africa and enable both job seekers and employers to engage and interact at a low cost, self-service manner.
Giraffe’s CEO Anish Shivdasani said, “We are thrilled to be integrating our platform with Harambee as part of the SA Youth initiative – which is by far the largest ever coordinated effort to tackle the scourge of youth unemployment in South Africa. Together with Harambee, Giraffe will be able to impact far more young people and businesses than we could have done alone.”
Harambee CEO Maryana Iskander added, “We have always applauded Giraffe’s focus on inclusion and access in their product design and are thrilled to leverage this as we kick off Youth Month and expand the reach of the SA Youth platform.”
Note: An earlier version of this article stated that the Harambee Youth Employment Accelerator acquired Giraffe which was not the case.
