Akhtaboot.com: Creating a Career Network

With an official unemployment rate of 15.4% and an unofficial unemployment rate ~30% there’s no shortage of job seekers in Jordan (figures from here). To date, there are only two ways to find gainful employment in Jordan – 1) go through your friends and family; 2) knock door-to-door and hand out your resume. Aside from these two routes, there really is no other way of obtaining employment. A nearly non-existent third route, and for that reason not included in the first two categories, is by replying to job advertisements in newspapers. Clearly, this is a major pain point. Akhtaboot.com hopes to address this issue by providing an online community of job seekers and employers. (You can read their mission statement here. The Company is marketing themselves as a Web 2.0 company and have the logo and AJAX to feel at home with the myriad other “Web 2.0″ startups. If you thought the logo is pretty neat, it was unsurprisingly designed by SYNTAX Digital, Ahmad Humeid’s company.)

Akhtaboot.com is not the first company to begin addressing the online job market in the Middle East. Bayt.com has been doing so for quite sometime and is the undisputed leader in the field in the Middle East. Akhtaboot.com is currently focusing primarily on the Jordanian market and hopes to expand in the region over time. The Company’s business model focuses on two revenue streams: 1) Paid job listings (posted by employers); and 2) Online resume searches. Both of which revolve around potential employers posting job listings and searching for potential employees. The Company is heavily marketing itself in Jordan through radio and and online advertising, mainly through Google Ads and they now also appear on Facebook.

The pricing structure is as follows:

The Company was co-founded by Yousef Shamoun, a graduate of McGill University with an MBA from Georgetown. I had a chance to sit down with him and discuss the tech. startup environment in Jordan and the Middle East, and his plans for Akhtaboot.com

Part 1: The Technology Environment in the Middle East
Part1.mp3

Part 2: Running a Startup in Jordan
Part2.mp3