Africa’s newest continent-wide jobs platform Everjobs is planning to extend its operations to 20 African countries by the end of 2016. Eric Lauer, CEO of Everjobs Uganda said this in an interview with Innovation Village.
“My vision is also our hardest challenge: getting everjobs accessible to African SMEs,” he said.
According to him, African SMEs need to have access to the best talents to expand and they now mostly recruit by word of mouth, which limits them tremendously.
“I’m sure that everjobs can bring a revolution to the human capital of SMEs and small family business in Uganda and entire Africa. In the many meetings I have with Heads of Human Resources is own issue always brought up: the huge gap between the skills on the CV and the actual skills on the job. So I also aim for everjobs to have a big impact on employability and close this gap. We’re working hard to reach out to leading education facilities like universities, to put online quality content from our partners in many industries and career advice to reduce this gap. Downsizing this employability gap will make this talent revolution actual,” he said.
He added that the company’s staff size is also growing very quickly.
He said: “Taking together central and country teams we are employing around 100 people and this number will grow up to 300 people in 2016. Just take Uganda as an example, we started this year with one person in the office and now we already have a team of five. The team is still growing, planning to open up some internship opportunities soon.
“The country teams are having the chance to meet hundreds of enthusiastic Heads of Human Resources who want to be part of this great project and are currently actively using everjobs for their recruitment. I’m very grateful to them. They are also taking care of all applicants by providing them with good feedback to increase their employability. We at everjobs care for people and aim at giving equal opportunities to all clients. The contact with our user base is very interesting, as they give a lot of feedback to make our service better. So we are improving on a daily basis. However, sometimes it is also very challenging.”
He added that the company’s intention is to have a true pan-African footprint, which makes a lot of sense both on supply side of the job market for employers and demand side for professionals.
“As we had a lot discussions with Heads of Human Resources of large multinationals we gained the insight that they aim at sourcing talents on a regional basis, be it all of East Africa, all of West & Central Africa or sometimes even at the African continent level,” he said.
He noted that there is increasing mobility of talents across Africa, so everjobs is able to offer them opportunities outside their local labor market. Professionals also experience everjobs different.
“Our service is 100% free for professionals and we will never charge someone for linking them with job opportunities. Further, we directly link job seekers with the Heads of HR unlike aggregators that combine job openings from companies’ career portals so applicants never know where their application is going. We guarantee that their application lands directly with the Heads of HR.
“Even more significant, candidates are always informed when their application is read by recruiters. This aims reducing the kind of anxiety you face when waiting for an interview.
“Another main distinction is on the product for our clients. We’re working hard to give as many functionalities as possible to Heads of HR. With our standardized CVs, they can use many filters on the search. The filters are based on the relevancy for the position offered. We’re also giving them the opportunity to head hunt directly in our CV database so that they have a glimpse of the talents available in the country. In the last step, we also offer background checks of applicants after they’ve been short-listed candidates to verify the references of an applicant.”
