INNOVATIONS
NIGERIA
An 18-year-old Nigerian developer has launched a new recruitment platform aimed at changing recruitment in Nigeria.
The platform, Yolpe.com, has been launched in Beta and is designed to match job seekers and recruiters in the region.
Developer and ‘Chief Evangelist’ Howard Izundu says he became interested in the recruitment space when his father was looking for work. “For the past one year, I have had a roller coaster ride testing out different iterations in this space e.g. an internet job marketing site (hirepuss.com), social networks for employees to discuss, service for employees to complain about their jobs and warn off prospective companies etc. Then at my internet job marketing site, I discovered something.
As incredible as this may sound, job seekers were hardly applying at recruitment portals of small companies nor did they send quality resumes. This showed that job seekers were hardly interested in small SMEs, who were my major clients. In contrast, bigger organizations usually had a surplus of applications for every single job opening, which they hate, and applicants are usually under-qualified. So there is a surplus on one side and a deficit on the other.”
“Another issue is that you would publish a job opening on job boards without knowing if you would even get enough attention or quality applications. That why if you look closely, you would see companies doing re-runs of their ads, especially in newspapers. There is also the fact that companies do not usually have multiple positions open at once so they may usually hire one or two persons to fill this hole immediately and they usually fill this holes through referrals .”
“Also, if you have job-searched before, you will see that the present job-board system is broken at its core. I really do not blame the job-seekers for not applying as I well know the despair and discouragement that comes along with going to newspapers or job-boards, finding a suitable job and subsequently applying without any-hope of being selected, falling into the recruitment black hole.”
Izundu says the new platform aims to solve these problems by connecting job seekers with employers, removing the middlemen and creating ‘demands at both ends and sell it to both sides of the table. Easily.’
He says: “At its core, it’s kind of like a dating site (marketplace) for employers and those looking for work, having a noble mission: To make Job Seekers’ information easily accessible online, enabling employers find them faster, speeding up the employment process.”
The portal is optimised for mobile use and aims to make finding an employee easy and eliminate job ads, applicant tracking systems, company recruitment portals and the system of applying for jobs by emailing resumes.
