Microsoft Open Source Blog 
For rapidly-growing, Middle Eastern small- to medium-sized businesses, hiring the best employees is a challenge. Both busy employers and ambitious talent find the existing job boards slow and cumbersome. In response, start-up SocialDice has made the process easy, intelligent, and fun by aggregating regional job boards in one place and using a proprietary smart algorithm that slashes the time it takes to make the ideal connection between great opportunity and outstanding talent.
Professionals looking for their next break – and fast-growing small companies needing help
In an ideal world, there would be no gap between hirers and job seekers. But unfortunately, such a gap does exist in the rising economy of the Middle East. The hiring process’s bureaucracy and unreliability too often frustrate both employers and applicants. And who has time to trawl through the thousands of CVs constantly being thrown up online?
Internet technologist and entrepreneur Saed Shela understood the problem thoroughly, and wanted to be the one to solve it. What if intelligence were applied to the problem, at scale, to speed up the process? The result of his insight: a highly-promising new technology platform, SocialDice. Nurtured under Microsoft’s BizSpark program, the platform has already made life a lot easier for hiring managers.
SocialDice is a Microsoft ASP.NET front end powered by a unique mix of proprietary AI software, written in Java, running on Linux on Microsoft Azure and the Open Source MySQL database engine. The specially developed smart system rapidly scans, filters, and routes candidate details and pattern-matches them to the best openings. This saves both sides of the Middle Eastern hiring ‘equation’ a huge amount of time and effort.
But is SocialDice helping organizations solve the problems Shela identified? For a growing band of relieved regional employers, the answer is a resounding ‘yes!’ Employers from UAE and Jordan are now enjoying a much easier hiring process based on infinitely better data and are easily able to find the qualified professionals they need.
Microsoft: ‘A genuine willingness to help’
Shela says of all the decisions he has made so far, opting for Microsoft has probably been his best. “We were on Amazon Web Services (AWS), but Microsoft offered us an excellent alternative. Customer service is outstanding with BizSpark, and the Azure credits are really helpful for building in the future,” he enthuses. Saed is also impressed with what he has seen of Azure’s own planned AI extensions in the Machine Learning space: “We think that will help us work even more quickly and accurately.”
Nael Ramadan, the innovative company’s head of technology, echoes Saed’s sentiments regarding Azure. “We started off with AWS, but I got very frustrated with their lack of responsiveness. We ran into a technical issue at an early stage which meant loss of data, and I just couldn’t get through to anyone to assist us. In contrast, working with Microsoft under BizSpark and on Azure could not be greater. There is a genuine willingness to help.”
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