Careem has consistently been known for attracting the best talent in the region. With the resources and brand they’ve developed over the years, it’s probably easy for them to hire just about anyone now. However, the challenge was quite different in their early days as a startup with only a few million dollars in the bank and far from being a household name. But they still managed to do it. In the video below, Mudassir Sheikha, the co-founder, and CEO of Careem, shares insights on how they pulled it off.
Speaking about how difficult it is for startups to hire top talent in the region, he said, “It’s actually a bit more challenging in the region than it is elsewhere. The best talent in the region wants to work at multinationals, they want to work with, government, they want to work with big brands locally. They don’t want to work at startups. It’s actually quite a challenge getting the top talent to work at startups and the the sad part is that the top talent can make more impact at a startup than anywhere else.”
“They call it the power law which basically means that a top hire gives you 20 times more productivity than an average hire, not 20 percent twenty times more activity than a than an average hire. This is for startups because there’s very little institution capability so you absolutely need to get awesome people on board and it’s actually not that easy.”
The first strategy is offering equity to everyone in the company. It’s important to note that when Careem started, giving stock options to startup employees wasn’t a default in the region. Some companies were doing it for some of their employees, but very few used to offer them to all their employees.
In the video below, he states, “We started giving equity to everyone in Careem. So everyone at Careem; from the person that picks up the phone when you place a booking to the person that is heading a city or the person that is heading a function has equity in the business and they are owners in the business so they are actually going to be becoming rich and wealthy and doing well as Careem does well.”
The second thing that Careem did for attracting top talent was acquiring smaller companies within similar business segments.
“When we found companies that had awesome people that were doing something that was similar to us, we tried acquiring them. Not necessarily for what they had built but because of the talent that would come into Careem as a result. We actually got our third co-founder Dr. Abdulla Elyas as a result of an acquisition. So we acquired Enwani in Jeddah and that’s how Dr. Abdulla Elyas came on board. So we have done a couple of acquisitions. We did one in Morocco and that’s how we got the Morocco team on board.”
Mudassir continues:
“So we did acquhires when we found awesome talent and you know we didn’t have any money to to acquire these companies so we used equity to buy them and that’s actually been good for the people that that ended up getting acquired because equity has actually gained a lot of value.”
The third thing Careem did to acquire top talent is probably the most interesting one. It was basically not giving up when you’re chasing top talent. Speaking about it, Mudassir shares the example of Enwani again.
(And for context, bringing Dr. Abdulla Elyas on board was perhaps one of the best moves in the history of Careem. Saudi Arabia was arguably the most important market for the company in the region, and the founder of Enwani helped Careem do exceptionally well in it).
“To acquire Enwani, it took us almost a year of convincing to get him onboard. So when you find people that are awesome that could be a great fit for what you’re trying to do you don’t give up. If they reject you, then go back in, if they reject you, go back in. You just keep going back in and make sure that you get those awesome people on board because those awesome people will get you 20X more impact than someone that is not so awesome.”