Beyond the CV: How Pupilar is helping change the way companies hire in the UAE

In the world of hiring—a good CV can often be the deciding factor for choosing a candidate. It isn’t easy to chance upon that perfect document either, more often than not, it relies on striking that perfect balance between under-evaluating or over-evaluating oneself.

In 2019, ex-university acquaintances, Aqsa Khalifa and Maimuna Rashid observed that the hiring space in the UAE was saturated with platforms offering traditional CV-based selection.

Skill-based hiring was scarce. Recognising this gap, the duo began researching and conversing with people in the region to understand the landscape.

In 2022, they came up with Pupilar, a skill-first HR tech solution that helps youth find internship and job opportunities in the UAE.

“We believe that moving ahead, people are going to be more skill-centric in the approach of finding opportunities and the current CV-based recruitment system does not have a scope for evolving a skill-centric solution,” says Maimuna.

Pupilar allows companies to hire in two ways, through talent-based sourcing, and challenge-based sourcing. In the challenge-based sourcing route—candidates are given the opportunity to showcase their skillset to a potential recruiter.

“We take a particular activity or challenge that they are facing in the company or a challenge around the role that they would like to hire for and present it to the candidate,” explains Maimuna. “The candidate attempts it, after which, we analyse the skills and split the analysis into work skills, soft skills, and hard skills and present those ratios to the client,” she adds.

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This process can be standard or customised. The companies that opt for standard hiring choose a “template” provided by Pupilar, following which, the hiring process is carried out. Customised means that the companies can create their own tests, activities, or challenges to recruit.

Besides this, Pupilar also carries out the traditional CV-based option under its talent-based hiring offering—which involves artificial intelligence. “We use AI tools to see how the existing CV metric allows us to source these candidates. We have certain filtration techniques to ensure that we still attend to the candidates’ skills, instead of completely relying on the AI tools,” says Maimuna.

At the moment, Pupilar looks at catering to those in the 15-30 age bracket. To ensure it is actively targeting this group, it carries out an internal approval process. During this process, the team interacts with the candidates to ensure whether they can be onboarded to the portal or not.

Till date, it has worked with 120 companies to offer its HR tech services and counts Cisco, Dubai International Finance Centre, Aurora50, and Sharaf DG as clients. It has 54,000 youth as a part of its existing network.

Easing freshers into the interviewing process

In Maimuna’s words, young people are generally intimidated by the word interview. “To highlight their skills, we need to ensure that they are comfortable in their surroundings…” she tells YourStory Gulf Edition.

To work around this hesitancy with the interviewing process, she says a solution is to change the agenda to a networking event. “We feel that the recruiter and the candidate can connect and understand each other better,” she adds.

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This is applicable for clients looking to hire in large groups. For those with 2-3 persons requirement, Pupilar arranges trial days—where candidates get an opportunity to stay in the office and understand a company’s daily functions in addition to an interview.

“Often, interviews are hot seats where you have twenty minutes to quickly answer everything and that is about it. You do not understand that you have a say as well,” Aqsa adds.

Besides easing candidates into the interview process, the company also gives them access to a number of activities like mentorship programs and other events.

Getting onto the platform

Once onboarded, a candidate becomes a part of its larger database and can access the activities. In these programs, Pupilar brings together industry leaders to interact with the candidates.

“The way we do it is different. We get them in disguised clothing so the youth do not know that there is a leader in their midst so that they are less intimidated and the conversations are more free-flowing,” says Aqsa.

The topics are largely based on employability skills such as career growth, personality development, intra-company interactions, and industry specific skills.

Pupilar has also formed a youth community called GEN2XP. The community members meet every 2 weeks.

Overall, the average recruitment time period ranges from 7 to 30 days, which depends on the response rate of the company involved.

Market scope and future plans

The Middle East and Africa’s (MEA) online recruitment market is expected to grow from

$1,939.15 million in 2021 to $ 2,512.43 million by 2028, as per a report by Market Research with a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 3.8%.

Pupilar aims to tap into this growing market and is working towards developing a freemium model in the future. At present, it charges companies based on a per hire model as well as a membership model, while users can access the platform free of charge.

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“In the case of a per hire model, we charge them for each hire they make, and if they need extensive access to our larger database, they opt for a membership,” says Maimuna. In the Middle East, it competes with platforms like Wasta, LinkedIn, Vervoe, Oliv, and Naukrigulf, to name a few.

“Our minimum ticket size is $25000 dollars, and we aim to raise $500,000 dollars this year,” says Maimuna.

Considering markets beyond the UAE is also on the cards, besides other virtual options like the metaverse. “We also see ourselves embracing the world of crypto, NFT, and metaverse into the hiring,” Maimuna concludes.