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The distribution patterns of the global working-age population are starting to change dramatically. North America and Europe both have aging populations and by 2040, the African continent, with a projected population of 1.1 billion, will have the largest workforce globally.
So how are African countries preparing, and what opportunities are there for employers to tap into this mega talent market?
My guest this week is Hilda Kabushenga, CEO of The African Talent Company. The African Talent Company is a group of pan-African businesses working together to bridge the talent gap in Africa via career development and recruiting solutions. Hilda gives us a unique insight into the current African talent market and its incredible future potential.
In the interview, we discuss:
• How will global workforce demographics change over the next few years?
• Reskilling for the future for jobs where there is demand for talent
• Making interventions around the right skills, democratic access to opportunities, and job creation.
• How does upskilling work at scale?
• Delivering courses on WhatsApp to deal with data availability issues
• Opportunities for global employers to access African talent
• The potential impact of AI
• What will things look like by 2050
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Matt: Hi. This is Matt. Just before we start the show, I want to tell you about a free white paper that I’ve just published on AI and talent acquisition. We all know that AI is going to dramatically change recruiting, but what will that really look like? For example, imagine a future where AI can predict your company’s future talent needs, build dynamic, external and internal talent pools, craft personalized candidate experiences and intelligently automate recruitment marketing.
The new white paper, 10 Ways Ai Will Transform Talent Acquisition doesn’t claim to have all the answers, but it does explore the most likely scenarios on how AI will impact recruiting. So, get a head start on planning and influencing the future of your talent acquisition strategy. You can download your copy of the white paper at mattalder.me/transform. That’s Matt Alder dotme slash Transform.
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Matt: Hi, there. Welcome to Episode 627 of Recruiting Future with me, Matt Alder.
The distribution patterns of the global working-age population are starting to change dramatically. North America and Europe both have aging populations and by 2040, the African continent, with a projected population of 1.1 billion, will have the largest workforce globally.
So how are African countries preparing, and what opportunities right now for employers to tap into this mega talent market?
My guest this week is Hilda Kabushenga, CEO of The African Talent Company. The African Talent Company is a group of pan-African businesses working together to bridge the talent gap in Africa via career development and recruiting solutions. Hilda gives us a unique insight into the current African talent market and its incredible future potential.
Hi, Hilda. And welcome to the podcast.
Hilda: Hi, Matt. I’m really happy to be here.
Matt: An absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Please could you introduce yourself and tell us what you do?
Hilda: My name is Hilda Kabushenga. I am the CEO of The African Talent Company, which is a group of job boards operating on the African continent. We are in Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya and Uganda.
Matt: So, tell us a little bit more about the businesses that you run.
Hilda: So, we run four job boards across the African continent, Jobberman in Nigeria and Ghana, and then BrighterMonday in East Africa, in Kenya and Uganda. They were all homegrown, and eventually acquired by Ringier AG, which is a Swiss company and is now 100% our shareholder.
Across our different markets, we run job boards, we run eLearning and upskilling for young Africans. We do a lot of remote work across the board and a bit of a search, hybrid shortlisting product to support SMEs who are not yet digitized. I think we’ve got around 200,000 employers all in, and 5 million job seekers across the four markets, yes. And then all of this is supported by a tech team that sits in Cape Town.
Matt: Fantastic stuff. Now, I saw you presenting the TA tech conference a few months ago. I was absolutely fascinated by some of the insights and the stats that you were sharing. So, really happy to have you on the podcast. You talk a lot about, in context, what you do in terms of the global demographics of the workforce. How are those global workforce demographics going to change over the next few decades?
Hilda: Oh, that’s a really big one. I think from where we’re sitting on the continent, most of our countries have got 70% of their population below the age of 30. We see a really, really young workforce. That’s directly contradictory, opposite to what you see in the global north, which is aging workforces, and people getting out of work and increasingly a gap that cannot be filled by local talent.
So, when I think about how this is going to change as young Africans grow and get upskilled and become the largest workforce in the world, we’ll begin to see a lot of this intermingling, whether it’s through migration or through a lot more remote work or some AI assisted work presence. But it’s going to change and we’ll see a lot more young Africans participating in the global workforce.
Matt: What does that currently look like on the continent of Africa? What’s the labor market like? How are the countries preparing for this change?
Hilda: I’d say it’s ground zero. Again, if 70% of the population is below the age of 30, it means really that the rate of population growth is a shock to everybody. We’ve seen it coming, but now getting even stronger. It’s ground zero in the sense that the way we’ve been training young people across the continent, our education curriculums, what we thought about as education and the pathway to work is just not that relevant anymore for many reasons. One, technology has come into play. Young people can go to YouTube and learn how to code or learn to become a graphic designer. They don’t need to go through a four-year university program anymore.
At the same time, just understanding how the African content is set up, even the traditional facilities that would have been institutions of learning, like universities, are getting overwhelmed. So, we’re going to see a lot more bite sized learning, reskilling. Today, for example, they say around 18 million young Africans get into the workforce, graduate into the workforce, but only 3 million jobs are being created. And on average, some people spend up to five years looking for a job. That means by the time a job finally comes round, you actually need a new set of skills.
I think we’ll see a lot of interventions across this barrier with a focus to say, where’s the demand for labor today? Where can you learn– What’s the six-month path for you to get from where you are right now to supporting a client or company in Germany or in Switzerland or a place where labor is needed? And that would be good of a role to bring the cost of learning lower. Ideally, we get people who are skilled for today or for tomorrow, as opposed to the old school system of a four-year university degree that doesn’t take you anywhere. It’s really exciting to see that play out. But today’s day zero. We’re still at ground zero. Pretty close to ground zero.
Matt: What’s happening right now to solve those issues?
Hilda: Yeah. I’d say a lot of people, governments, multilateral organizations, a lot of people who have spent time in this area and space. And even from our perspective, the job board, we see this. Today, there’s a theory of change for young Africans to find decent livelihoods. The first part being good and relevant skilling, as we’ve just discussed. If you’re studying something for which there’s no demand in the labor market, you’re not going to head anywhere. And also, maybe there’s a different way for you to learn it.
The second part is democratic access. The idea that even when opportunities exist, the best candidates don’t always find out, and think about what’s happening with remote work today.
Even though Germany has a labor gap around 2 million people, there’s probably 2 million unqualified in one way or the other depending on how you want to look at it, Africans who could fill this gap. But that level of democratic access, which will take policy, it will take technology, a whole lot of things to solve is also something that can be improved. I think a lot of effort is going into bridging that gap.
The third piece, of course, just around job creation and what’s being done strengthen SMEs. I think one of the things we see in our business, for example, is that the listings flywheel, if I can call it that, doesn’t quite work in the African continent in exact same form it works elsewhere, because we don’t have that high number of transient jobs. We don’t have a lot of SMEs that are hiring at scale. So, the key metrics that will drive a typical listing business don’t exist.
But if interventions can be done and they are being done to strengthen that, for example, taking people from the informal sector to embody them into ecommerce, helping them formalize their business so they can hire more, there could be more opportunities structured for young people. So, those are the three intervention areas, I would say. The one around, the right skilling, the one around democratic access and the one that around the actual creation or sourcing of opportunities. If they’re not at home, they may be from abroad to home.
Matt: Let’s talk a bit more about right skilling and upskilling, because that’s obviously come up as an issue several times. It’s an issue in lots of different places, because as you say, the speed of change around skills is just unprecedented at the moment in terms of the lifespan that they have. How does upskilling work at scale?
Hilda: Ooh. So, one of the things we’ve done well, especially in Nigeria, through our brand, Jobberman in Nigeria, is upskill young people at skill. It’s been a journey. I’d say, when we first started, we saw the need, because with our two-sided marketplace, naturally we’ve got the seeker and the employer. Initially, this is 2019 and kept getting feedback, “Your candidates are not well qualified. He has a first-class degree. He can’t write an email.” They need some workplace readiness. So, initially, the idea was, “Let’s make soft skills available to every young person who comes to our platform, or every fresh graduate who comes to our platform, or anybody, really,” so we can bridge this gap a bit for our clients.
Initially, our idea was, let’s integrate with Coursera, which we did. Kind of successful, but not quite, could reach a number of people. We started holding Zoom classes in the pandemic and realized ways they could be successful, especially in context, for example, in northern Nigeria, where you have women only cohorts. So, we saw the benefits of that and said, “That’s something you can lean into, perhaps as we refine the curriculum, having live sessions, almost like a MOOC event.” [chuckles]
Then we went even lower tech realizing that Coursera is not being successful, because for most of our young people, their total disposable income is probably $20 a month, including what they’re going to spend on data. Meaning, a 5GB course would just never be the right solution for them. And so, we went even lower to start building Telegram and WhatsApp bots, which could reach a lot more people, because even if you can’t afford a full smartphone or social media, or you can’t load the job of a website, you probably have WhatsApp or Telegram at 200 MB. That’s a course you can do. That became another leg of that.
Went even further to have sometimes, in person training. This happens in spaces where we go– And for the first time, these are people who could have university degrees or maybe some technical education, but haven’t actually interacted with the internet yet. And so, we’re starting with digital basics, how do you navigate Google, how do you set up an email? That’s the journey that they have to walk on their path to digitization. We walk that path with them.
To date, so now, just given all the methodologies I’ve described, I think four years later, we’ve trained about 1.5 million people, that’s incredible, and linked around 450,000 of them to opportunities, some gig work, some full-time work.
Matt: That’s absolutely amazing. Just wanted to come out of interest, tell us a little bit more about the WhatsApp course. What can you teach through that kind of channel, and what’s the take up on it?
Hilda: So, today, we have maybe six core curriculum areas. The first one being soft skills. Essentially, you’ll be surprised. It’s not much different from how you’d build a Coursera course. Instead of maybe live videos, it’s more graphics, infographics. It’s really bite sized learning. So, imagine it’s a chat bot you can speak to. Hopefully, now with Meta AI, we’ll be able to do even fancier things with it. There’s a chat box, you speak to it, you get to demographic, you pick a course. It could be soft skills, it could be digital basics, it could be starting a new business, it could be ecommerce essentials or how to be a gig worker.
There’s a number of options. But then every single clip of video we send you, which is in line with WhatsApp will be super less than maybe two minutes long with some text for you to read through, and you get maybe five of those in each module and there’s like a mini quiz. Eventually, when you’re done, it’s self-paced learning, really. Eventually, when you’re done, you’d have a much longer quiz and the certification once you succeed.
One of the things that we realize is that our WhatsApp and Telegram bots, compared to Coursera or other online courses, we had seen where the completion rates were way below 10%, our WhatsApp and Telegram bots actually have a completion rate of about somewhere between 23% to 27%. So, much higher. I guess it’s because it’s also in the native ecosystem of the learner. They’re using it to talk to their friends. Either way, they’re chatting with their parents, and it’s right there at their own pace.
Matt: So, lots of employers listening to the podcast based in the US and in Europe. What are the opportunities for global employers when it comes to talent in Africa and offshoring and those kind of things?
Hilda: I think there are very many things that the African continent is doing well. And also by country, you can see specializations. If we take Kenya, for example, and that’s we’re our second largest businesses, or even Nigeria and all our markets. We know we’ve got a very white-collar platform. About over 60% of people on our platform have a bachelor’s degree and above. They’ll definitely speak English, which is an advantage that people typically look for in their offshoring, either English or French, because it’s Francophone Africa or Anglophone Africa. Especially for Europe, the time zone is quite similar. The time difference between Nairobi and Berlin in the summer is just one hour, the winter is two hours. So, it’s quite friendly.
There’s a really, really great opportunity for coast arbitrage. Because if you think about the typical, let’s take a call center, for example, which is something we do for clients, you find somebody in a call center in Nairobi is earning around $800, which is an extremely good salary in Nairobi, where minimum wage is around $150. But if you compare that to the total desk cost of somebody like this sitting in even India today or the Philippines, it’s a bit higher.
The gap that we need to bridge and we’re working on is how do we build more trust or confidence in the capabilities of African talent, because I think lots of people do not know what they’ve not been exposed to. And the question becomes, if I hire a graphic designer in Nairobi, can they really deliver the same rate as a graphic designer in Germany or India or in the Philippines where I’m used to? So, there’s that trust gap that’s missing, but the talent does exist.
Matt: So, you mentioned AI a little bit earlier and the alternative technology approaches that you’re taking in terms of upskilling. What role does AI and technology play in all of this more broadly?
Hilda: Honestly, we’re still going to find out. In our market, it’s actually interesting because we operate in a space where a lucrative job listing can get up to 50,000 applications. How do you even sort through that? You can use all the tests you’re looking for. You want, you can use a whole bunch of things. Best-case scenario will bring down the shortlist to 3,000. That’s still a lot for an employer to deal with.
One of the things that we’re beginning to see with machine learning and AI is ability to connect a lot of data points across our candidates such that this does not happen. One, you don’t need to get to a place where the listing has 50,000 applications, because you know exactly who you’re looking for. And more importantly, you can even connect the data we’re getting from all their learning, from the certifications and the skills badges, from the bots and from everything else in the ecosystem to say, “Actually, for this particular client, these are the best candidates.”
I think this journey could evolve to a point where people going straight to the interview stage, given the developments of AI. But again, for us still at the very beginning, I think as a group, overall as a company, lots of research, lots of testing use cases similar to anybody else in the industry right now, really, but nothing concrete.
Matt: So, as a final question, tell us about your overall vision. What do you hope things will look like by, say, 2050 when these demographics have played out properly?
Hilda: Yeah. I think one of the ways I love to speak about this is just by speaking about how we’ve structured our business. Initially, our hypothesis was you can build job boards in Africa and have a digital recruitment business and the fly will go. Having operated for a while, you begin to understand, wait, even though B2C is highly digitized, B2B is not yet highly digitized. We’ll get there in the future. But right now, you have to have some hybrid approach because for lots of our clients, for example, interacting with us is the first time interacting with digital recruitment.
So, there’s a lot of market education still happening. We ended up having like a hybrid pillar as well, where we work with clients, not necessarily driving them to an ecommerce channel necessarily, but just understanding their needs and where they are and figuring out how we can use internal technology tools to serve them in a way they understand. I think eventually, as the continent grows and as all these demographics change and it gets more digitized, this part of the business might shrink down. I don’t know, but we’ll see the hypothesis, more digitization, less of the offline.
The third pillar we have is around outsourcing. This just be speaking again to this global demographic change. The idea that increasingly more young Africans will work remotely to serve the global north. How do you prepare for that? How do you make sure we got the right skills for that? Investing in things like German lessons or creating a German database or pool of candidates in a platform, because we know that’s something that’s coming, or French and other languages as well. That’s important. That’s caption outsourcing.
The fourth one, which is taking up a lot of our focus, is how do we actually prepare the workforce. So, we’ve got over 5 million job seekers on our platforms across the different countries. We know that the only way that they’re going to be able to take advantage of, whether it’s the outsourcing opportunities, whether it’s the jobs created locally, is if they’re ready.
And so, we spend a lot of our time investing in research and creating new bite sized courses, more relevant opportunities, trying to figure out where the jobs of tomorrow and how do we make sure that our seekers or people on our platform can be ready for them today. We work with many multilateral organizations like the UN, GIZ, the Mastercard Foundation to do this, because it is the right thing to do. And of course, internally, it also naturals our platform because then we’ve got better qualified seekers.
So, if I push this out to 2050, I think the African market will have a lot more of that one, a much better qualified labor force. Too much work is going into making sure that this happens. And I believe we’ll succeed. We’ll see, of course, similar to the outsourcing pillar, a lot more remote work and cross continental opportunities for them. I think the digital hybrid might merge with a lot more digitization to be seen and more confidence in the idea of online recruitment and that democratic access to find the best candidate as opposed to the offline way.
Matt: Hilda, thank you very much for talking to me.
Hilda: I’m so glad. Thank you too. [laughs]
Matt: My thanks to Hilda. You can follow this podcast on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify or via your podcasting app of choice. Please also subscribe to our YouTube channel by going to mattalder.tv. You can search all the past episodes at recruitingfuture.com. On that site, you can also subscribe to our newsletter, Recruiting Future Feast, and get the inside track about everything that’s coming up on the show. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next time. And I hope you’ll join me.
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