Entrepreneurship Zone: 13 August 2020: The ins and outs of running an online jobs platform in Nigeria

Thu Aug 13 05:30:09 CAT 2020

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Entrepreneurship Zone: 13 August 2020: The ins and outs of running an online
jobs platform in Nigeria

 <mailto:info at bulls.co.zw> 

We talk to Hilda Kragha, CEO of Jobberman Nigeria, the country’s largest job
placement website, founded in 2009. She discusses the company’s revenue
model and explains why LinkedIn is not giving her sleepless nights.

The barriers to entry for a job listing site are relatively low. To what do
you ascribe Jobberman’s longevity?

There might be very few barriers to entry for a site, but there are barriers
to scaling that site. It is difficult getting from zero to your first one
million users. You have to build the kind of relationships required with
human resource heads in order for them to be comfortable using your
platforms over and over again. This takes time. You also need the right
product suite that fits both in terms of price and functionality and you
need the right tech so that you never have any downtime. Then you need the
right level of jobseekers. If you only have entry-level candidates it is not
going to be attractive to people who are looking for experienced hires.

What has helped Jobberman with its longevity is focusing, from the very
start and even now, on quality job listings as well as on using data to
inform our decisions and not to be distracted by the easier ways to do
things e.g. scraping jobs from all over the web.

Who are your competitors?

Our competitors are actually quite localised. LinkedIn, of course, has the
capacity to make a huge play in the recruitment space and probably be very
successful, but the fact that they don’t have boots on the ground so far in
Africa has held them back. We usually see people simply sharing what they
have posted on Jobberman on LinkedIn as well.

Hilda Kragha

Our bigger competition is the offline players. There has historically been a
reliance on offline systems that have been in place for decades and decades.
But now, especially with the pandemic, a lot of these recruiters that we
previously considered competition are coming on board as collaborators. They
are realising that Jobberman can also be a service provider to them.

Describe Jobberman’s revenue streams.

Our core business model is the recruitment services that we offer through a
number of products. Currently, our basic job listing is free of charge as
part of our coronavirus initiatives [Under normal conditions a basic listing
costs 11,500 Nigeria naira ($30)]. The next product costs 54,000 naira
($120) and includes a listing as well as a built-in assessment. Our most
popular product is Pro-Recruit for 90,000 naira ($233), where we will give
you five pre-qualified candidates in five days. Finally, based on the fee
model of 10% of the annual salary of the successful candidate, we offer the
end-to-end recruitment product all the way to executive level. The future of
Jobberman, however, does not lie in executive recruitment. I think it is a
good business line, but if you think about the solutions that Africa needs,
it is usually scalable solutions driven by tech and you cannot do executive
recruitment via technology as it relies on relationships.

Advertising revenue on the platform is less than 5% of overall revenue. Some
of the other job boards in Nigeria have a lot of listings because they
scrape from all over the web to drive traffic and attract advertisers. We
deliberately don’t do that because we want our site to have good content and
be easy to use. Sometimes having too much advertising on your site, even
though it brings in revenue, makes the user uncomfortable.

What metrics do you track to make sure you are showing the growth you want?

We track active job seekers and active employers, but there is a risk that
this can become a vanity metric. We use our Net Promoter Score (NPS – a
metric that measures customer experience and predicts business growth) to
see if customers are happy on our site. Then, naturally, we track revenue.
We also track the three and six month retention rate – seeing if the people
who have used our products are coming back.

We also look at total leads versus organic listings. This is an interesting
metric to measure if the work of the sales team, who are going out and
holding events, translates into listings.

What does the sales team look like?

Our sales team is divided into four distinct groups. You have the telesales
team that is calling to sell the product and listings. The field sales team
are typically more senior and engage in face-to-face meetings. Then we have
the customer service and success team whose primary objective is to make
sure anyone coming to Jobberman achieves the result they set out for and is
happy with the service they receive – for example, they vet employers when
they list to verify that all the information is accurate when presented to
job seekers. Then, lastly, we have the head-hunters team, which deals with
executive recruitment.

Jobberman has just formed a partnership with the Mastercard Foundation with
the aim to train five million jobseekers and place three million in
employment within five years. Explain the business rationale for this
partnership?

Jobberman has been offering employability training for some time, even prior
to the partnership. However, the business rationale of the partnership is
threefold.

On our jobs platform, as in any marketplace, you are dealing with two core
stakeholders. On the one hand you have jobseekers and on the other hand the
employers who want them linked to jobs. For a marketplace to work
effectively, there has to be trust in your ability to match the two.

We have 2.2 million jobseekers on our platform, but we historically kept
getting the constant feedback that jobseekers are not qualified: they have
first-class degrees but can’t write a CV; they are not ready for interviews;
they have no idea how to behave in a workplace. This affects our
marketplace. By investing in jobseeker training and upskilling them, we are
making sure that our jobseekers are better prepared for work. It means that,
inevitably, our employers – the side that we monetise – will be more
successful because they have a pool of better qualified candidates. That is
the first aspect of the partnership.

The second aspect is that we will be able to develop products that will help
employers to recruit better, such as assessment products and personality
tests. These are objective data points which, if employers use them, will
build trust in the marketplace. You might not trust the university that the
candidate went to or maybe their qualifications. However, if you have given
a candidate a skills-based test and they passed, or you have assessed their
personality and know it is what you are looking for, then you are more
willing to trust the Jobberman platform. It will give the market the
objective metrics that can be used to inform good hiring decisions.

The third aspect is that it will unlock opportunities around data. We have a
database of 2.2 million jobseekers and 67,500 employers. Nigeria does not
necessarily have any official body that is tracking employment rates or the
quality of jobs. It means we are in a position to provide this insight. We
can help to show the jobs that are the hardest to fill and where the talent
needs to be developed. Or we can see which jobs are oversubscribed and where
employers feel that university curricula is not achieving its goals. At a
macro level we can analyse this data. This, in turn, helps trainers that
want to build curriculums and policymakers who need to make decisions. We
can be at the forefront of employment and of the labour conversation in
Nigeria.

Will you monetise this data?

In the short-term, we would definitely offer it free. In 10 years’ time this
would be a different conversation, but for now it is mostly to help people
make better decisions and to help us improve our brand profile.

Tell us about your expansion plans?

We are already part of a pan-African offering through our parent company
Ringier One Africa Media, so the focus is on expansion within the country.
If you look at the Jobberman platform today, about 70% of all our listings
are within Lagos, Abuja or Port Harcourt. We are investigating what it would
take to get us in all 36 states. One of Nigeria’s largest challenges is that
young people keep migrating to find opportunities, but maybe if Jobberman
was in some of the secondary states, we could highlight opportunities in
those states as well and more young people would be willing to stay home.
For this, we need to have willingness from local partners such as the state
governments. We also need to consider that we would likely have to offer
lower-tech solutions, possibly integrating into USSD.

The secondary expansion focus, which is related, would be to move from a
traditionally white-collar offering to include blue-collar jobs. We
understand that this means that we will likely be moving into the gig
economy. Here specifically a big challenge is verification. If you allow an
artisan into your home, you have to be comfortable that the person is who
they say they are and won’t leave havoc in their wake.

INVESTORS DIARY 2020

Company

Event

Venue

Date & Time

CBZ

AGM

Virtual

14  August 2020 | 6pm

Lafarge

AGM

Virtual

18 August 2020  | 12pm

Companies under Cautionary

Bindura Nickel Corporation

Padenga Holdings

Delta Corporation

Meikles Limited

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