Souktel JobMatch in 2011: Boosting Employment and Growth Through Mobile Technology

From SMS recruiting solutions to audio job hotlines, 2011 was an exciting year for Souktel JobMatch. As mobiles became must-have tools for job seekers across the developing world, JobMatch also proved to be an essential service–linking employers and workers in emerging markets via SMS and mobile audio. As the year comes to a close, we look back at key milestones from the past 12 months:

Empowering Employers to Hire Quickly and Cost Effectively
When tech leader Cisco wanted to recruit new college grads for its Entrepreneur Institute, it turned to Souktel to streamline the process. Souktel leveraged its mobile hiring platform to find the right people from among 8,000+ Palestinian JobMatch users. For Cisco, the ability to recruit youth by SMS proved crucial: Instead of posting newspaper ads and receiving a flood of CVs, Souktel’s platform let Cisco staff reach out to a specific group of youth–new business graduates with fluent English–through Souktel’s unique ‘filtered search’ system. “If you want to find females, in the capital city, who have business degrees, our software lets you do that,” explains Souktel co-founder Lana Hijazi. “From a web interface, you can select the exact criteria for your candidate search,and then immediately you get a list of all Souktel users who fit your needs”.

Teaching Smart Money Management to Young Somali Workers
This past fall, Souktel partnered with US-based non-profit Education Development Center to create a new interactive teaching tool that helps Somali workers learn financial management basics, through audio-based storytelling and mobile quizzes. The service consists of 40 mobile-accessible audio lessons about saving and budgeting, along with test questions which job seekers can answer by calling a toll-free hotline and choosing dial pad menu options. For low literacy youth entering the labor market, this service has become a lifeline: In its first week alone, the hotline received more than 100,000 calls.

Sharing Best Practices with Colleagues and the MediaThis year, Souktel staff were honored to speak at key public events about our efforts to link employers and job seekers via mobile. In the winter, we shared our insights at the World Bank’s Human Development Forum. In the spring and summer we presented at USAID’s first-ever Mobiles for Education conference, and joined Intel and Inveneo as panelists at the Global Youth Economic Opportunities summit. This fall, we were fortunate enough to meet with (and speak alongside) US Vice President Joe Biden at the 2nd annual Global Summit for Entrepreneurship in Turkey; September also saw Souktel profiled as “the Monster.com of Morocco, Somalia and Palestine” in Fast Company magazine.

Watch Souktel Speak at the Clinton Global Initiative’s Annual Meeting: http://bit.ly/adjd1J

What is Souktel? The Mobile Phone JobMatch Advantage
Souktel is the first service in the Middle East that matches job-seekers with employers through audio and SMS alerts on mobile phones. Learn how Souktel’s technology helps businesses and employees save time, save money, and connect with more people than ever: Visit  www.souktel.org.