How the Experts Hire for Their Fast Growing Companies in Kenya

Take it from me — One of the biggest challenges we’ve had at our company, Duma Works, is recruiting the best talent. And we are an online job-matching site!

We face this challenge specifically in Kenya, but I know it is difficult world-wide.

Specifically, hiring MANY people at the same time in order to meet your company’s growing needs is VERY difficult. Especially if you haven’t done it before. You need to have some pretty good processes set up to make sure everything stays organized.

Kenya is going through a lot of changes right now, especially when it comes to how businesses are run.

Managers at local companies are looking at formalizing their processes and grow quickly to face international companies setting up shop in Kenya.

Young founders are also creating a new ecosystem of startups providing loads of different services to Kenyan consumers and companies.

All these people now looking to hire people quickly could gain from insights from the experts on best hiring practices for fast growing companies.

Since I’m part of a startup at the heart of talent recruitment in Kenya –

I thought we could take the lead on this ask some of the employers we work with about what their best practices are to hiring a good team under pressure.

I spoke with employers at fast-growing companies in different sectors and here’s what I came up with –

Azam Samanani — Hoggers Ltd. (East Africa Licensee for Steers, Debonairs Pizza, and Ocean Basket)

High churn & thinking about retention early-on

In the service industry, even though there are a million other variables to manage, we essentially run a people business. In an industry where you typically have a very high turnover rate, we’ve managed to cultivate a good amount of loyalty (employees with 10+ years of service) and continuity (internal promotions and growth). We certainly have our share of problems and mistakes, but there are a couple of things that seem to be working for us.

Firstly, we hire a lot of trainees and take the time to assess them on the job before we offer them a full time position, and second, we regularly take time, without the presence of immediate supervisors, to listen to employee concerns and questions.

We aren’t always able to make changes based on what our team members request, but they generally appreciate being heard and responded to in a timely fashion.

Asim Shah — Tarpo, Global Management Challenge

Innovative methodology

Our organisations are at a point where we often need a new hire to start yesterday. So we’re looking at the quickest way to assess and find the best candidate — and if you’re not employed then you’re looking at getting a decision equally fast.

We’ve recently used video interviews, where we ask the candidate to record themselves answering a series of time-bound questions. This is effectively an opportunity for you to do the elevator pitch so we get to see your verbal communication skills, body language, confidence and general warmth before we decide to meet you in person.

When we then meet you in person we’re looking for consistency between the video and the real you. If we looked at your CV then we’re still looking for consistency. Don’t get someone else to write your CV for you — we can tell!

Nancy Sangoro — Jumia Kenya

Efficient processes

How to hire quickly:

1. Have a very good understanding of the position that you would like to fill, as well as the non negotiable skills that are required for the position.
2. Ensure to craft a JD that will attract the right caliber of candidate that you are looking to recruit.
3. If you are recruiting for a fast growing company, you need to cast your net far and wide hence make use of all the tools you can use to post the Job: LinkedIn, FaceBook, Networking, Probono sites as well as Partnerships with recruiters.
4. Ensure that you have organized the interview questions in a manner that you are able to compare responses from candidates and hence select the appropriate candidate faster.

Beryl Opar — Nokia

Long-term interview planning

Internal Hiring -The first step in the hiring process should be to notify existing employees of the open position before posting publicly. Internal job postings give employees who may want to change jobs within the company a chance to apply and/or look at their own professional networks for possible candidates.

Create a long-term talent plan. Most of the time spent during the hiring process is a result of actively seeking out qualified candidates to interview. To cut down time, hold informational interviews with prospective candidates well in advance of a job opening. Revisit or “check-in” with impressive candidates you may have interviewed in the past if they are a good fit for the role. A good talent pipeline may even eliminate the first-round HR screening process that adds days/weeks to the hiring process.

Be more selective about the candidates you bring in for an interview. The most time-consuming part of the interview process is often the first-round interviews. Bringing in five to ten people for an interview when in reality you are only impressed by three to five of them is a time suck. Improve your resume review process to identify the great candidates quickly.

Eliminate steps that add time to your hiring process. For example, request references from candidates at the time of the first round of interviews not after the final round of interviews. Check the references for those candidates who make it to the second interviews before you think about extending an offer.

Moses Kemibaro — Dotsavvy

Keeping processes objective & systematic

In my experience you need to meet lots of candidates for each position to pick out the best one. This is time consuming and can be frustrating but finding a person who is the right fit, has the right attitude and is not just in it for the money is key. Keep each interview to 30 minutes at most for the first round before short-listing

Your first pick may NOT always be the best person for the job. Just because one has the best credentials does not mean they are the best person for your start-up. Chemistry is key and sometimes your gut is the best source of decisions. CVs don’t answer all the questions correctly

Test out candidates with hands-on scenarios to figure out how they think. In my experience, lots of people have excellent credentials but if you put them in the deep-end they may not be able to meet your expectations so curve balls help sift out the best ones for your start-up

In terms of on-boarding, get EVERYONE in your start-up to have some face-time on day one with your new team member. Even if each meeting is only 10 minutes the idea is for them to feel at home in the shortest time possible.

Make sure you send out an intro email that includes some background info on new hires when they come in. This helps people know who they are and what they are there to do.

If possible, try and have a team event or lunch shortly after the new team member arrives (within 2 weeks?) so that they can get a feel of the start-up from a culture perspective and get better acquainted with their colleagues in less formal circumstances.

Elizabeth Nyakwea — M-KOPA

Using hiring partners in Kenya

In all honesty, it will save you a lot of time and a lot of money in the long run to use consultancies and recruitment agencies. The turn around time is a whole lot faster and since most already have a ready database of candidates and in addition use different types of evaluations to asses the candidates. Your more likely to make a smarter hire this way. As you grow bigger, than you may want to consider having an in-house recruiter to handle all your recruitment needs (say when you forecast to do more than five mid-level recruitment a month, every month). They would be the point person on all matters recruitment, assessing what the best avenues are for each position.

Referrals are also a good source of candidates. These can be from your current staff, friends, family and even acquaintances. People know people who know people (who know people) who are good at doing the job you are recruiting for. Ensure you specify your requirements in terms of skill set and personality so that the potential referees understand what you need. Current staff are a particularly good resource especially if their engagement levels are high and see great potential for growth for themselves and anyone else who joins the team. Your network (friends, family, business associates) would also be a good resource, again, specificity on the skill set is essential so as to reduce the number irrelevant CV’s you receive. Capitalize on your social media platforms and utilize this to communicate your recruitment needs.

Finally, if you do not mind getting spammed with applications, there are a few free job sites that have established a presence in Kenya and are well known by candidates. You will get a large number of applicants with only a quarter of them coming close to what you are looking for. There is the potential to find a star in the midst of all of them. However, this may prove to be time consuming since you would have to sit down to sort the wheat from the chaff. All in all, it will cater to your needs at the end of the day and is mostly efficient for entry to mid-level types of candidates.

Stéphane Eboko — Ma3Route

Getting cultural fit right

Yesterday I was chatting with one of our advisors who designed the maps for Waze. He’s been working with an awesome team. We were talking about how to attract the right talent for Ma3route, specifically, I was asking him what types of things we should look for in people during the interview.

When it comes to digital product designers, we should look for someone who has worked in a startup before, has had an impact on the product that they contirbuted to, and the ability to learn something on the go. Good questions to assess this are: What have you recently self-taught yourself What is the most exciting project you have worked on recently? What is a new technology that you are most curious about?

For Ma3Route, we also need to make sure candidates care about people- Even if they volunteer. This indicates to us that they would care about our end-users, the people crowd-sourcing our data, and our overall community. If they care, they will go the extra mile for our users.

To make sure we are also on the same page about this dedication to our users, I always tell candidates up front that I took 4 days of vacation last year. On Christmas, we were working, New years, we were working. We work 7 days a week because people move around 7 days a week — from 6a to 10p. The people we hire really do need to care, and need to understand this level of dedication at the beginning.

Ma3Route is currently recruiting for a UI Developer (full-time) and an IOS Developer (contract) — For more information, contact stephane.eboko@ma3route.com

Nancy Butama — Juhudi Kilimo

Scaling entry-level hires in rural setup

Scaling brings its own challenges and we have been able to adapt a new approach into recruitment.

One of the facts about Micro-finance business is that they grow pretty fast and if not well managed, this can pose a talent challenge to the business. At Juhudi, we need to have enough of the right talent to take the business to the next level. This need for capacity led us to develop and introduce an internship program. The interns are recruited competitively and we look out for people who have completed college as well as their industrial attachments and are now looking for jobs. This program gives them the benefit of 3–6 months on the job training and those who are stand out in this program are absorbed. This is a well-structured and ongoing program.

We know our yearly human capacity needs and at the beginning of the year, we bring the interns on board, take them through a on-boarding program so that they understand business expectations, and then post them in different branches. The interns are given a mentor at the branches to help them adopt quickly into the business. Continuous coaching and mentoring is carried out by the Branch Manager and the mentors.

We have found that getting this entry-level group of people gives us ability to instill our values from an early stage and promote people internally.

In Summary

Be methodical. Be organized. Be specific. Treat people well. Value culture fit. Don’t improvise as you go along.

About the author: Arielle Sandor is the CEO and Cofounder of Duma Works, an online and SMS-based recruiting platform in East Africa that has helped over 250 growing companies recruit awesome people through a standardized sourcing and pre-screening process.

If you are hiring in East Africa, try Duma Works! We help you create your recruiting process so you get it right the first time.

With any questions, Arielle can be reached directly at arielle@dumaworks.com

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Posted in Recruiting & Leadership Tags: DUMA Works, effective recruiting, human capital, Kenya, Leadership, nairobi, Recruiting, scaling, startups

Originally published at dumaworks.com on February 12, 2016.