Bayt.com and Souktel Partner to Provide Professionals across Egypt with Answers to Their Questions via SMS

Professionals in Egypt now have access to Bayt.com Specialties on their phone

Cairo, Egypt – Bayt.com, the Middle East’s leading career site, has partnered with mobile solutions provider Souktel to launch a new SMS service for professionals across Egypt. The service, linked directly to Bayt.com’s popular Bayt.com Specialties platform, lets professionals get answers and advice from peers and experts in various areas of specialization. Through the new SMS service, mobile users can ask questions via text message, and receive timely answers directly to their mobile phones.

The new service addresses the growing demand in Egypt for personalized, professional advice—especially among the majority of professionals who only own basic mobile phones. Despite having a mobile penetration rate of over 100 percent, only 6% of Egyptians own a smartphone. The new service ensures that non-smartphone users have the same any-time access to content as their peers who have data-enabled devices or home computers.

Using the new service, a marketing professional might ask a questions about “product differentiation strategies”, or a sales manager may ask a question about “salespeople’s incentives schemes” by sending SMS messages to a 4-digit hotline that’s accessible from any mobile network in Egypt. The questions are immediately posted to Bayt.com Specialties, where they can be seen and answered by over 18 million professionals registered on Bayt.com. The answer is then sent back to the sender of the question via SMS, removing the need for web access.

Omar Tahboub, VP of Product, Bayt.com said: “We are excited about the launch of the Bayt.com Specialties SMS service, and the possibilities it brings for professionals in Egypt to ask questions and receive answers from other specialists in a timely and organized manner.  We hope that this service will take us another step in the direction of empowering professionals in the Middle East.”

Yazeed Sheqem, Souktel’s Middle East/North Africa Business Development Director, said: “The launch of this service creates incredible opportunities for the millions of Egyptians who don’t have regular computer access. The Specialties SMS service gives professionals a chance to interact with a community of peers and mentors—right from their mobile, without needing the Internet. Souktel is honoured to partner with Bayt.com on this initiative”.

Bayt.com is the leading career site in the Middle East, offering a complete range of end-to-end employment solutions and career planning tools. Founded in 2000, Bayt.com is fully functional in English, Arabic and French, and offers the fastest, easiest, most effective and cost-efficient methods for employers to find quality candidates, and for job seekers to find top jobs, in the Middle East and North Africa. With over 18,000,000 professionals and over 40,000 leading organizations using Bayt.com's recruitment platform across all industry categories and career levels, Bayt.com is today the single largest marketplace of professionals and companies in the region.

Founded in 2006, Souktel designs custom mobile solutions that help emerging-market communities get information about jobs and local services. From its offices in the Middle East, Souktel changes lives across the Arab World, Africa, and Asia—working in partnership with regional employers and mobile networks to serve more than 250,000 mobile users. Souktel’s unique work has been profiled by Arabian Business magazine and MBC TV, and has won the King Abdullah II Award for Innovation and Achievement in Jordan.