INTERVIEWER: MAHMOUD MANSI
EDITOR: MENNATULLAH ZEINELDIN
PHOTOGRAPHY: OMNEYA DIAA
About DOORS Egypt: In December 2014 a new kind of “game” was introduced to the Egyptian culture; that is “Escape Games”. It started in Cairo and now through DOORS Egypt, launched on the 12th of November 2015, the game has arrived in Alexandria. Escape games or escape rooms are widely spread in different countries like the UK. Doors is a real life escape room simulation game, where you get to have a real life experience of action and excitement. Participants are locked in one room of their choice for one whole hour in a team consisting of 3 to 5 members. They have to work together in order to find a way out. The participants “will have to solve mind games, puzzles and riddles to try to get out of it.” So far there are three different scenarios in Doors: Haunted Room, Wild West Jail and White House Down.
The project is founded by a group of young Egyptians with the average age of 25. The founders are a mixture of Engineers and a business specialist.
THE INTERVIEW
1-HR Revolution Middle-East Magazine: You are introducing a new product to the Alexandrian community. What are the consumer behavior challenges that faced you?
DOORS Team: People are used to hearing about a tangible product. When customers heard about our escape games they tended to ask themselves then ask us “What do I get in return after solving the riddle?”
People are used to receiving a gift when doing something, even if this thing is for their own benefit, like beating a mental and physiological challenge. However, after playing the game they understand the magnitude of the benefit and they come to play the other games. Our challenge is to convince them of this from the beginning.
2-HR Revolution Middle-East Magazine: There are many computer games that enhance the strategy and ability to work in teams; like Counter Strike and Generals Zero for example. How is that different from what you offer?
DOORS Team: Of course these games have a very positive effect on strategy and teamwork; however, what we offer is totally different. It is not a computer, or a virtual game. It is a game where you interact mentally and physically, excluding the virtual world. You communicate, debate, persuade, brainstorm, experiment, use trial and error, you lead and follow, all in a reality and not in a virtual world. Even in videogames they are currently trying to encourage physical action, because physical action along with mental action generates better results.
In Doors, it is not a videogame; it’s a real life experience. We even encourage all our guests to avoid using the phone while they are in the waiting area. We want people to take a break from technology and use a different kind of intelligence, thus we provide them with puzzles until their turn comes.
3-HR Revolution Middle-East Magazine: As an HR Magazine we are also interested to know about the conflict between having your career and your own private business. As the business owners of DOORS, do you have a day job? And why didn’t you quit after launching your own private business?
DOORS Team: Yes most of us have day jobs. We didn’t quit because as soon as you can manage your time, schedule and balance between your jobs without negative interference, we think everybody should invest in his or her free time, besides it would lower the risk that anyone would feel at the beginning of their business or startup.
4-HR Revolution Middle-East Magazine: Do your employers know that you have your own private business? Does this create any sort of conflict with them?
DOORS Team: Yes, they know we have our own business, yet, it does not cause conflict at all since we are all able to create a balance.
5-HR Revolution Middle-East Magazine: On your page you introduced the idea of DOORS very well, yet recently you have posted on your page a very different ad, and you wrote on the post “Tag your Manager”, what was the effect of this advertisement on the consumers?
DOORS Team: It attracted many employees who were actually tagging their managers which helped us reach a different segment of people. This ad also highlighted the importance of venturing escape games to the corporate field, and building a bridge between viewing this as an exciting game and viewing it as a professional training.
6-HR Revolution Middle-East Magazine: For employees, what is the value added? What do they actually learn and can apply in their organizations?
DOORS Team: The following values are added to employees, students and even family members. They experience and learn more about teamwork, dealing with stress, leadership, dealing with conflicts. In the end they all reach a conclusion that they need each other in order to survive this, so it doesn’t matter who is the leader and who is the follower, what matters is the teamwork and result, because some people can be leaders in their work or life, but when they enter the challenge they get surprised by finding one of their friends being the new leader in the game. The challenge actually makes people discover more about their capabilities, know their negatives and positives, and most of all learn how to follow, and when to follow.
7-HR Revolution Middle-East Magazine: What are the different departments that form DOORS?
DOORS Team: There is the CEO, board of directors (responsible for the management process), and the rest of the founders are only investors. As for the departments, we have a Marketing and PR department, and another department related to the direct management of the place itself and the guests. There is a third department called the “control room” which consists of a team that is responsible for monitoring the people inside the rooms and making sure they follow the rules of the game. This department also focuses on the people’s safety. In the end, they provide the players with comprehensive feedback. We also have Eng. Ahmed Abd El-Hafeez as our CFO; he is responsible for the accounting sheets, the salaries and dealing with our lawyer.
8-HR Revolution Middle-East Magazine: Launching a business in a field that is somehow new to your backgrounds, did you create the management and workflow system from the start, or was it a trial and error?
DOORS Team: We had our own system organized from the very start, yet after the opening we made lots and lots of updates, because as we worked we discovered details that were not there before on paper.
9-HR Revolution Middle-East Magazine: As a startup, when did you start the recruitment process?
DOORS Team: Five weeks before the opening. We started the recruitment after the venue was ready, and after we started our marketing campaign, which was outsourced. We started the campaign in October 2015 and we opened in November. The marketing campaign helped us in two ways: it increased the audience’s awareness of what we do, and helped us a lot in starting the recruitment process.
10-HR Revolution Middle-East Magazine: How did you start the recruitment process?
DOORS Team: The recruitment process took around three weeks. We first started by writing the job skills and specifications that we seek in our employees, and we wrote a brief about the job without going into details, because the idea was still new and maybe job seekers would be hesitant to send us their CVs. We thought that the face to face orientation would be best. We then posted the jobs in several recruitment websites and social media pages.
Around 90% of the applicants heard about us from the recruitment on social media pages. We filtered the CVs, then made the calls and interviewed the applicants. The ones who were accepted were well trained. The first thing we did with the applicants was letting them into the escape room as their first training. The accepted candidates were very happy as they imagined a totally different working environment when they first read the ad, and the reality is that we create a very fun environment for our employees.
11-HR Revolution Middle-East Magazine: What was the age group of the applicants who sent you their CVs?
DOORS Team: We received CVs from different age groups, but the majority came from fresh graduates and undergraduates.
12-HR Revolution Middle-East Magazine: On what basis did you filter the CVs?
DOORS Team: Since we are not searching for technical qualifications and we are more into the personality of the applicant and his/her ability to deal with people, their qualities are difficult to spot in the CV. Unfortunately you will find most of the CVs written in the same way, and in the end in the “Skills section” the applicants write the same exact things: leadership, teamwork, ability to work under stress, multitasking, etc…
Since most of the CVs were kind of similar, we interviewed around 90% of the applicants. When the applicants emailed their CVs to us, many of them left both the subject of the email and the body empty. They should address each company with its name and with a decent message. Some other applicants sent us their CVs in a long email thread, as they sent their CVs to DOORS and to 19 other different companies in the same email. Many organizations do not accept CVs this way. We did.
We carefully reviewed all the CVs and we were not judgmental; however, we advise jobseekers in general to always address the employer in the subject and in the body of the email.
In CV filtering, we mainly focused on the enrollment of the applicant in civil and social work, because this tells a lot about their personality. It also shows that they also have good social and communication skills.
13-HR Revolution Middle-East Magazine: Were there any applicants who avoided the repetition of information in their CVs?
DOORS Team: Around 5% of the CVs did not have this repetition, and they were mostly engineers. I think engineers care more about highlighting their technical abilities.
14-HR Revolution Middle-East Magazine: Did you outsource a recruitment consultant to help you in the selection or you have done that on your own?
DOORS Team: We all worked together on this without outsourcing as one of our team members– the CEO Mr. Ayman Ghareeb – is specialized in the HR field.
15-HR Revolution Middle-East Magazine: How did the interviews go?
DOORS Team: Well we started with the usual questions asking the applicants to introduce themselves; then, we started asking them about the activities and details mentioned in their CVs. We found out that many of the applicants were not 100% accurate in the information they gave us, and a few of them exaggerated about their activities. From the interview you can know who was actually an active and knowledgeable member and who was only claiming to be so.
16-HR Revolution Middle-East Magazine: Did you provide feedback to those who were not accepted in the interviews?
DOORS Team: We only informed them that there was someone else accepted. Since our selection was based on personality traits and not technical ones so this would be a very sensitive area, not everyone would be willing to receive criticism or advice in a positive way.
17-HR Revolution Middle-East Magazine: As an Egyptian employee, what are your comments regarding HR in Egypt?
DOORS Team: I don’t think HR is well implemented in most companies in Egypt except for multinationals. HR should be more concerned with the problems of the employees, not only problems that are directly related to work. HR should also consider people’s moods and put them in a working environment that constantly refreshes their moods and high spirits.
Here in Egypt due to the high rate of unemployment, many companies abuse this fact and deal with their employees in a way that includes some abuse, kind of like saying “You should be thankful that you are currently employed.” However, the way I see it, the employees should have a specific time and fun place to have their breaks in, there should be games to release their stress as well.
18-HR Revolution Middle-East Magazine: Assuming that most of the HR mentality in Egypt is thinking this way, how do you think you can approach them to see DOORS and escape games as a sort of training to their employees?
DOORS Team: This is a challenge of course, since our work is to create challenges, so this will be an exciting one for us. We will prove that it is a win-win situation for companies to use this training. In the end, the manager wants to see actual results, in the form of production, money and intelligence. When the manager comes to visit us, and observes the attitudes and reflex actions of the gamers from the control room, he/she will know how this is a truly effective way of training. Not only so, but it will show the manager the hidden capabilities in people that were not visible through their routine tasks, especially when applied to his/her employees.
Eventually, the manager can build decisions on reallocating the roles of employees in his/her own company and will know more about their strengths and weaknesses in only one hour, which is something that might take months or years to discover in your employees through the routine.
HR Revolution Middle-East Magazine: Thank you so much Mr. Mohamed and your team for this interview and for the inspiring changes you are making to the social and business culture in Alexandria.
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