Harambee Youth Employment Accelerator acquires SA recruitment startup, Giraffe

Giraffe, a South Africa-based mobile recruitment platform has been acquired by the Harambee Youth Employment Accelerator. With this acquisition, Giraffe’s existing user base of jobseekers and employers will be merged with the initiative over June.

Founded in 2015, the Giraffe is an automated job search and matching platform focused on entry and mid-level skill sets such as call center, field sales, customer service, and retail.

Giraffe’s mobile app enables job seekers to create a free CV with their smartphones, enroll in educational courses and apply for jobs. As a result of its partnership with leading networks in South Africa, the Giraffe platform is zero-rated on all network services.  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 has won the global 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.

Commenting on the acquisition, Giraffe chief executive officer (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,”

Maryana Iskander, CEO of Harambee said, “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,”

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. This is why Giraffe’s platform was considered 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 in a low cost, self-service manner.