Lekan Olude is the co-founder of Jobberman, an online portal which has grown to become the biggest job online portal in Nigeria. In this interview with Bukola Aroloye he speaks on the mission and vision behind Jobberman, plans for the future and his management style. Excerpts:
Tell us about your job at Jobberman
I’m Lekan Olude, one of the co-founders at Jobberman. As the Operations Manager, l see to the day-to-day running of the business. There are other two guys who also run the company with me.
What has been the challenges and achievements since you started Jobberman?
In terms of the achievements, it has been quite tough trying to blow our trumpet. Based on what the market has shown, we are currently the biggest job board in the country and also in sub-Sahara Africa. In the past seven years, we have expanded to Ghana and have strategic partnership in East Africa.
Overtime, we have been able to touch about 60,000 companies and at the same time, we have about three million candidates on the portal that applies for job online. Have we done so much? I will say no. Do we have a long way to go? I will say yes. Considering the fact that if you look at the companies registered with Corporate Affairs Commission, we have not even scratch the surface. If you also look at the workable population, we have not done anything. In terms of challenges, we have encountered challenges that every normal business in Nigeria face where you have to practically be your own ‘country’ in business. In terms of policies, we have had challenges in terms of support from the banks considering the fact that banks hardly support internet companies. This is because we don’t have assets and the only assets we have is our data and that doesn’t amount to anything for the banks. In terms of the country accepting the fact that the business has come to stay, it is also a challenge.
Nigeria is country where the big companies don’t want to leave space for the upcoming companies. So you fight your way into the space. It has been interesting because Nigeria is an interesting place. When you wake up in the morning, your life can change whether you are making money or not.
What informed the idea of Jobberman in the first place?
For Jobberman, the idea came up when we were in school. There was strike and the three of us didn’t find it interesting going back home so we decided to make the most out of it. When we started, we didn’t think about making money. We decided to look into the internet space since we don’t need so much money to set up Internet Company. We decided to go into jobs because we felt it’s going to create value to the youths and create biggest impact.
We were pretty clear on what we wanted to achieve and how we wanted to go about it. While we were in school, we were able to take things one at a time and improve on them. The good thing is that 10 months before we left school, someone reached out to us and said he had been studying the website and wanted to be a part of us. So it gave us opportunity in terms of sustenance, and at the end, it brought us to Lagos. We had our first two major investments and the big break came when we had partnership with MTN. Before then, there were lots of challenges.
What has been the success rate in terms of the number of people that eventually gets job through your portal?
Recently, I read online where some people were saying Jobberman is not working, that people don’t get job on Jobberman. While I understand where their complaint was coming from, this is an opportunity to set things straight.
Jobberman doesn’t give jobs, we only link candidates to available jobs. For example, if you are an engineer and there is engineering job in Kaduna and you don’t know about it which if you had known, would have applied for it, we link you to it.
The company also does not know about you because if they had known about you, they wouldn’t have gotten an expatriate to do the job. That is one of the classic ways Jobberman operates.
In respect of the number of jobs we create, the number of jobs is enough for the number of candidates looking for employment so that speaks to say that if you have one job and 100 people applied for the job, 99 of them will not get the job. We do 6,000 fresh jobs in a month but not everybody on Jobberman is actually looking for job. People get on Jobberman to reach out to a candidate.
To determine the success rate, one will look at it from the perspectives of jobs clients gave to us and how many of them we are able to fill. We cannot provide jobs for everybody but the job that we brought out for people to see, the question is have we been able to fill those jobs? I will say yes. About 60 to 70% of the jobs that comes to us are filled. The remaining 40% is because some times, the skills needed are difficult to find in this country.
If a client is looking for a candidate with a certain skill and we have not been able to find that candidate, we reach out to the client to tell him we have not been able to find one. We have lots of that happen so in terms of success rate, we have done above average. We still have lots to do to ensure more people gets job.
How do you get information about vacancies? Also, people say there are no jobs in Nigeria but from your experience, will you agree to that since you said you do 6,000 fresh jobs every month?
There are jobs in Nigeria but the jobs are not enough. Access to information is not that strong. Employability is also a big problem. Are companies hiring? Yes they are. Are Nigerians filling all the jobs? No.
But the country churns out thousands of graduates every year?
Yes but for most of the roles that don’t get filled, they are not graduates roles. They are specialty roles and Nigeria has a huge brain drain. On a daily basis, people are carrying their bags and travelling out of the country and that is something to be worried about. Our educational institutions have not fixed the issue of specialist roles. For example, in the power sector, the technology is trying to change to make power more accessible and reduce wastage. But who are the people that are going to man these technologies. They have to bring them in. New roles are coming up but Nigerians are not filling them.
Technically, jobs are being created on a daily basis and information is not totally out there. Words of mouth is still the biggest channel of communication for jobs. Companies approach us for candidates and we also go to companies to ask them if they have vacancies.
Are you saying our tertiary institutions are part of the reasons we don’t have competent candidates?
They are not solely responsible but they are part of it. The strength of an organisation is the people and when you have weak people, you have weak organisations and when you have strong people, you have strong organisations. The people are the bedrock of a company. The people are formed within the academic world because they spend a lot of time acquiring knowledge. The quality of these people when they step out of school is extremely important. The incubation period is when people are in school.
From your experience, what kinds of job do you think are in high demand? Could it be those in administrative, ICT or those in technical field?
If you take a business and break it down, you realize most of the guys are those sales which means sales related roles are in highest demand. Then you have in-between mid level managers in the administrative field though not much compare with those in technical roles.
Technical roles are also so much in high demand. As a nation we are not strong technically and that is why more often than not, companies tend to go outside the country and bring in experts. The approach of government to ensure people gets technically sound is very key. Most companies in Nigeria are within SMEs rate which tells us that the transaction size of their businesses is very small. That also means most of the demands for roles are within lower and mid cadre. If trainings are focused along that cadre, we will have competent people and companies will begin to hire them and forget hiring expatriates.
We should be targeting people in the bottom of the pyramid, people that earns les than $3,000 a month and about 90% of Nigerians earns less than that.
What are your future plans for Jobberman?
One of the things we are trying to do is to increase our penetration along the recruitment capital value change. We are also trying to see how candidates can become more employable through Jobberman learning portal.
To our clients, we also try to strengthen some of the value added services. We are trying to leverage on the Jobberman assets in Nigeria,Ghana and East Africa by centralizing human capital assets and give employers more access to people, better efficiency in hiring and access to lots of data to be able to deliver better value added services to our clients.
What is your management style?
My style is to make everything inclusive. My role is to create the right atmosphere and moderate the company in terms of rules and regulations.
How do you motivate your colleagues?
Every human being wants some level of dignity and respect even from the driver to the CEO. The good thing about Jobberman is that a lot of us are young so it is pretty easy to motivate them. We try to ensure that at the time any staff comes to the company, and wants to leave, the staff becomes a better person from financial and developmental standpoint.
We try to ensure we pay our colleagues very well. We also bring in speakers to talk to the staff on any topic and have one-on-one interaction. Another thing we also do is organise social gatherings such as our ‘Thank God it’s Friday’ party where our staff have lots of fun.
We try to ensure the office is very good looking. To make it easier for our staff to get to office, we had to leave our office at Lekki and move to Marina. We continue engaging them and create an open office where staff can walk up to the top management staff and share ideas.
What has been your toughest decision?
When I make decision, if it goes good, fine and if it goes bad, I take it. Any decision that I made and does not take your life but gives you room to correct things, I don’t regret it. I hate to make people sad especially when you have to let an employee go.
What is the best decision that you have ever made?
You can say starting Jobbermnan is the best decision I have ever made but it could also be the worst decision because at a time of starting the company, I had other offers. The other offer was a lot better than starting a Jobberman as at that time.
However, I and my partners believed we should not dwell too much on our successes so it becomes very hard to pinpoint the best decision.
What makes you special?
I ask a lot of questions and talk to professionals whenever I want to make a decision.
What attracts you to people?
I love people that are intelligent, smart and knowledgeable. I like flexible people. I believe this life is not hard. I like humble people and those that love God.
