Nigeria’s unemployment figure is projected to reach 33 percent in 2022, according to available statistics, which signifies an impending national danger if effective employment opportunities are not created.
The situation is even direr by the brain drain the country is also experiencing with the rise of young Nigerians immigrating to seek better opportunities abroad. This, however, underscores the fact that promoting sustainable economic growth through productive employment is critical for solid nation-building.
If there is one constructive outcome of the latter, it is the opportunity that may have opened for entry-level jobseekers. Typically, young Nigerians are thrown into the job market in their thousands every year with little or no opportunities to break into employment.
This is the motivation behind Jobberman’s recently launched employer-focused initiative; the Jobberman Starter Promo. The timely initiative aims to contribute to employment growth and provide an enabling environment for employers looking to give young talents a head start.
The online recruitment and linkage platform’s essence is to bridge the gap between employers and entry-level jobseekers as much as possible. It explains the inspiration behind the initiative, which can help encourage the demand for young talents.
The Jobberman initiative focuses on entry-level jobs, where most of the people in the unemployment bracket fall in. The initiative allows employers to post entry-level jobs to an audience of multiple job seekers for free over a period.
Initiatives such as this are important contributors to reducing unemployment in Nigeria. The Starter Promo initiative will help employers save a substantial recruitment budget. It is common knowledge that recruitment is mostly not cheap. As a result, some organisations reserve a significant chunk of the budget for senior level and high target recruitment, thus ignoring the early career individuals.
Jobberman seeks to contribute to closing the employment gap in the corporate space by improving candidate uptake and facilitating entry into companies by supporting mass recruitment, entry-level jobs, internships, and graduate-level jobs. The Jobberman Starter Promo is designed to attract employers interested in posting entry-level job listings on the platform by offering free credit listing for the job.
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In recent years, the leading job platform which clocked 13 years in August 2022 has executed projects contributing to the economy’s growth by providing employment opportunities. Founded in 2009, Jobberman is a recruitment and job search platform but has grown into an all-encompassing career platform offering online career advice, personalised HR solutions for both individuals and institutions, and training services for jobseekers in Nigeria.
A common sentiment echoed by some employers suggests that a few young jobseekers lack the necessary basic or soft skills to thrive in employment. In cases like this, the young jobseekers must embark on self-education to improve their chances of securing available opportunities.
To support the jobseekers, Jobberman, in the past two years has provided essential pieces of training on its platform that are free to access. Their free Soft Skills training, for instance, focuses on critical skills like emotional intelligence, time management, and personal effectiveness, among others.
According to the company, employers eager to take advantage of the initiative will get unrestricted access to a talent pool of these soft skills trained candidates; if given the opportunity, it is predicted that these candidates will be high performers despite having little to no work experience. Also, the company urged interested parties to log on to its website for detailed information about the ongoing initiative.
“We are West Africa’s number one career platform because we ensure that we connect the right candidates with the right opportunities. We have built careers over the years and will continue to support Nigerian youth with the right employment opportunities. With our experience and expertise, we have identified the gaps in improving candidates’ uptake into companies and seek to remove the barriers. It is why we launched the Jobberman Starter Promo. With this, we can bridge the gap between employers in Nigeria and the entry-level job seekers in the country,” Oreoluwa Boboye, Jobberman CEO, said while speaking at the launch of the initiative in Lagos.
According to him, Jobberman is currently in an ongoing partnership with Mastercard Foundation’s Young Africa Works, under which the organisations seek to help young Nigerians be gainfully employed and be employed in dignifying jobs. As an offshoot of this partnership, the recruitment platform has launched the Jobberman Starter Promo to allow companies to utilise its job listing product for free for jobs that require between 0-3 years of experience.
The company said it believes that leveraging the partnership and the initiative will bring a sustainable change to solving early talent recruitment issues in the country and contribute to reducing Nigeria’s unemployment rate.
In the long run, the initiative and partnership will contribute to employment growth and provide an enabling environment for employers looking to give young talents a head start. Among other initiatives, the Jobberman Starter Promo project will help the organisation fulfil its promise to thousands of Nigerian graduates seeking hands-on job experience.
