Harambee Youth Accelerator acquires SA hiring app Giraffe

SA-based mobile recruitment platform Giraffe has been acquired by the Harambee Youth Employment Accelerator. Giraffe’s existing base of jobseekers and employers will join the initiative over the month of June as Giraffe’s direct services transfer to Harambee.

The platform helps job seekers create CVs on their smartphones, take courses and apply for jobs

Founded in 2015, the platform is an automated job search and matching platform focused on entry and mid-level skill sets. Youth unemployment remains one of SA’s biggest challenges, with our youth unemployment rate one of the worst in the world.

Finding solutions to SA youth unemployment – together

Giraffe’s mobile app helps job seekers create CVs on their smartphones for free, take educational courses and apply for jobs, and is zero-rated on all major 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 its launch, the recruitment startup 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 pulled over a million job seekers and thousands of employers, connecting around half a million unemployed youth with potential job opportunities.

The platform is a natural fit for Harambee, which aims to scale up youth employment efforts in SA and enable both the unemployed and employers to engage and interact in 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 SA. 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 celebrate Youth Month and expand the reach of the SA Youth platform.”

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Featured images: Shafin Anwarsha and Anish Shivdasani, co-founders of Giraffe (Supplied)