The two sections of the job market; employers hiring workers and employees seeking jobs are, like never before, facing great difficulty due to the fast-changing job skill demands versus work experience especially as regards the dynamics of technology advancement.
Human resource managers are grappling with the imbalance between the experience of senior-level employees- an ideal qualification for job seekers and possession of edge cutting technology skills among entry level employees who are mainly the youth with less to zero experience.
To harmonize this, WAAPE – a Ugandan technology company building digital solutions for human resource has embarked on the tedious exercise of scouting talent, vetting and readying them for uptake by hiring companies across the globe.
“We are a platform that helps companies globally hire tech and creative talents from Africa. Specifically, we deal in the tech and creative space; we have a pool of software engineers, designers, digital marketers among others. We scout and profile them so when companies approach us with a certain vacancy, we know who is best suited for that particular position according to the skills the available talents possess,” said Natasha Katondwaki Umwiza, a co-founder and Team Lead at WAAPE.
According to the latest Uganda Economic Update by the World Bank, the vast majority of Uganda’s labor force remains employed in low productivity activities. “This is largely because the most productive, rapidly expanding economic sectors are often more capital intensive than labor-intensive and employ only a small proportion of the workforce.”
This leaves a huge section of the employable youth, who possess various skills, unemployed. This was also a driving force for Umwiza and the team at WAAPE – to prioritize and market a person’s skills as an asset that employers can readily have.
“The level of unemployment in Uganda is high. The status quo also dictates that for someone to get employment, either you have to know a big person in a certain company or you must possess very many academic qualifications and years of experience. So, we wanted to create a platform where people can have meaningful earning opportunities basing on the skills they have and not whom they know,” Umwiza said.
Established in 2020, WAAPE initially operated on a hire on volunteer basis, where the talents would freelance and volunteer at different companies in prospect of retainment. Along the way, however, the team realized that companies were not only spending a lot of money on hiring campaigns but HR managers were also taking a lot of time vetting the applicants.
This changed WAAPE’s path towards a monetized talent management company.
“We are solving problems for employers in that they get access to high quality, pre-vetted talents. All the cumbersome work of vetting, approving is done by us. The employers just come to us for recommendation on which talent best fits their job requirement. This way, they spend less time and money in the recruitment process,” she said.
For talents, or job seekers in this regard, WAAPE enables individuals to create a strong portfolio and increases their chance of getting fished out by the numerous hiring companies that approach the company with particular human resource needs.
Umwiza says WAAPE’s journey has been a great one as they have grown their pool of talents to over 3,000 people and have over 30 companies actively hiring with them in addition foreign companies that have hired a couple their software developers.
“Our scope of operation goes beyond Uganda and Africa considering the fact that the local job market is already saturated meaning we have to tap into the outside market while maintaining remote working because we don’t want to be exporting people when they have the means to work from wherever they are,” she added.
The company’s 3-year progressive journey has, however, not been without challenges. Among the issues that have stalled their operations here and there is the overwhelming number of entry level talents who, in most cases, are sidelined by employers in favour of middle or senior level applicants.
“Sometimes the hiring employers require senior level employees who might not be in our talent pool and we are forced to poach them from other companies even though our talents possess the required skills. This is, however, getting better because of our awareness program. At least people now know what the future of the job market will look like and they are recruiting employees with the relevant skills not necessarily their work experience,” Umwiza explained.
For a company that set out to source talents all over Africa, Umwiza says there is still bias about the company’s abilities, especially among local audiences
She notes, however, that the firm draws strength from their achievements such as being able to partner with foreign tech companies- an opportunity to expand their operation as well expose talents from across Africa to the global tech sphere.
Apart from HR solutions, WAAPE has established ‘WAAPE events’, a department that helps companies advertise and market online activities, organize and conduct virtual meetings and product launches among other hybrid office events as well as managing post-event activities like uploading content for posterity.
This diversification, Umwiza notes, is a learning tool for their talents who get a chance to do hands-on practice as they await formal job appointments from hiring entities.
Onwards, the company has partnered and is still pitching for partnerships with companies and institutions in the skilling sphere to widen their talent sources as well as grow their talent marketplace to make startup gigs and opportunities more accessible for all.
