Forasna is Egypt’s first and most reliable online employment marketplace for Arabic speakers. Given that blue-collar workers alone represent 66.8% of the total active labor force in Egypt, Forasna was aiming to play a leading role in helping people find jobs and to help businesses of all kinds find and hire the employees they need.
Reachability of the blue-collar candidates is the top or almost 2nd top challenge employers face in the recruitment market; as phone calls are the only communication channel with them. Unlike white-collars and grey-collars, whom you can reach through emails and IM platforms.
We came to learn from the employers that they have trouble reaching candidates via phone calls. Either the phone numbers are unavailable, or they are not the main owners of that phone number as blue-collars tend to share their phone numbers with their family members.
We started investigating the extent of the problem and the whereabouts that led to it, to measure the average reachability issue. So, we went to our employer’s reporting tool and we reach the following conclusions:
Coming to understand the extent of the problem, we wanted to learn more and come up with practices that could improve it.
We started our extensive and thorough research by interviewing stakeholders who are in contact first hand with blue-collars, to learn as much as possible about their persona, behaviors, and the role of technology in their daily lives. We came to learn that reachability is an issue facing the global recruitment market, and it’s common among the manual labor roles due to socioeconomic status.
We moved to interview blue-collars, to better understand the reasons behind their unreachability. We concluded that it’s due to various reasons, starting with them frequently changing their phone numbers and lacking the motivation and awareness to update them, sharing their phone numbers with other family members, and bad networks in certain areas.