Iba Masood

Graduates in the United Arab Emirates trying to unlock the door to employment are in luck: Iba Masood has devised a web-based careers portal tailored specifically to their needs. What makes it special? ‘We exclusively post internships and vacancies for students and fresh graduates with zero to two years of experience,’ says Iba, 22, a very recent graduate herself. ‘It saves wasting time applying for “graduate” jobs that actually want people with four or five years of experience.’

Recruitment 2.0

Any ideas that this might be your run-of-the-mill corporate career website are way off the mark. The style is fun and funky, with bright colours and a relaxed atmosphere that perfectly suits the Facebook generation. For the others, Gradberry’s on the case: ‘we have an active drive to encourage employers to use our service; 65% of those who post an internship on Gradberry have never posted one anywhere else.’ To help career-seekers with their CV and general tips, Gradberry runs a lively blog called the Fruit Bowl, where professionals can share advice on the industries they work in, ranging across the board, from IT to graphic design and fashion to finance. The blog is free to use and all posts are instantly uploaded to Gradberry’s Facebook and Twitter sites. Job postings are featured on the Facebook site as well, thanks to a special application the company has licensed from the US, since, in Iba’s opinion, ‘social networks are the future for recruitment.’

Five fruit a day

Iba developed her idea when she hit the job market herself. ‘There’s virtually no information on the Internet for graduates in the Gulf region,’ which encompasses the UAE, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. ‘We have to visit sites in the UK or the US, which aren’t always relevant to our different needs and skills.’ The Fruit Bowl even has a section for aspiring entrepreneurs, called the Startup Shizzle – and if you don’t know what that means you will have got the picture: Gradberry’s target is under the age of 25! The whole site breathes life and upends visions of traditional recruitment. Make no mistake, though, Gradberry has been attracting big players, from IBM to Philips or Ikoo, the extensive advertising network in the Middle East. ‘Our employer targets are SMEs, however,’ says Iba. ‘They form over 90% of businesses here but lack the resources to individually approach universities to hire graduates – the old-fashioned way!’

Current revenue streams come from advertising and fees that employers pay to use the service. Having launched in December 2011, Gradberry posted 145 internship and job opportunities in the first seven months of operation, has notched up two million visits and is looking to raise a round of funding to develop a deeper search engine to filter the best employees. Registered users currently top 8,000, with 100 new log-ins per week and 15 to 20 employers joining each month. As of June 2012, 65 graduates have found jobs through the platform, which posted its first jobs from outside the UAE, in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, this summer. As for internships, they were previously few and far between in the UAE. ‘Employers aren’t familiar with the administrative procedure for internships,’ says Iba, who offers to help them understand the ins and outs of an internship contract.

Opportunity knocks

Iba herself oozes energy, but her path to entrepreneurship has not been without difficulties. Her first entrepreneurial experience came aged nine, when she made jewellery to sell to her friends at school. ‘It was short-lived, however: maybe I was making too much money, since the school shut me down!’ At 11, she rented out her collection of books and gave half the proceeds to a charitable cause. Her parents emigrated to the UAE from Pakistan 55 years ago and Iba was born there, but as a non-UAE citizen she has found certain doors much harder to open and is adamant about gaining exposure for young entrepreneurs in the Middle East, ‘I want to show everyone it can happen, because I think youth unemployment is the most important issue in the Middle East today.’ Indeed, many people attribute the start of the Arab Spring to unemployment among graduates, who knew how to turn the social networks to their advantage. Watch out, world: with Gradberry on the move, good graduates could soon be hard to come by!