How three students built Nigeria’s online recruitment giant

In the summer of 2009, three students had time on their hands when university lecturers in Nigeria went on strike.

Instead of slacking off, Ayodeji Adewunmi, Olalekan Olude and Opeyemi Awoyemi started an online job search company.

Five years later, their startup Jobberman has a multi-million dollar valuation, employs 125 people and is still growing.

While Nigeria is Africa’s largest economy, it still faces large-scale unemployment problems, especially among young people, who are more likely to be connected to the internet.

Jobberman has become the largest job placement site in sub-Saharan Africa, helping more than 35,000 people find work in the past two years.

The number of companies using the site to find employees has grown from about 40 in 2009 to about 35,000 today.

The site posts between 500 and 1,000 jobs every day, and the founders estimate that there are about 1,000 active users looking for work at any given time.

“The growth has been phenomenal and is happening at rocket speed. One of the biggest challenges is keeping up with the workload,” Olalekan says.

However, there were other challenges along the way.

“Initially, many people did not trust internet-based businesses because at that time, here in Nigeria, many people were using the internet to carry out fraudulent activities,” he says.

But as other online businesses grew and became trusted, so did Jobberman. Companies trust the site and come back after he has made one or two posts.

In 2012, some of Jobberman’s customers wanted to use the site to find workers in Ghana, and the company began working outside Nigeria for the first time.

Two years later, the company claims it is now the largest online job site not only in Nigeria but also in Ghana.

The company is currently expanding into Kenya with a partner called Brighter Monday. This partnership also allowed us to leave a footprint in Uganda and Tanzania.

Some people find jobs through sites without actually applying.

After uploading her details, Amarachi Apakama was approached by a company for a position as an executive assistant at a mobile phone content company.

“It really changed my life,” she says. “It was a morale booster. It gave me confidence. My interests and experience matched so well that I didn’t have to apply for the job.”

“Helping people become financially independent through job placement through Jobberman is extremely rewarding,” says founder Ayodeji Adewunmi.

“One company hired more than 80% of its employees through this site. In another company, directors were able to hire former colleagues from the US to come and work at the company here in Lagos. It’s also an amazing story.”

Olalekan-Olude added: “When you put food on the table for someone because you get a job, that person can also feed their mother and siblings, and that creates synergy within that household.

“And every time we hear a story like that, it makes us very, very happy. It motivates us and makes us look forward to the future and strive to help more people find more jobs. It will be like this.”