Jobs – Digital content associate
She Leads Africa believes in the power of young African women to build amazing careers and businesses, serve as community leaders and influencers, and eventually take over the world. Our #MotherlandMoguls, as we affectionately call them, are the reason we exist and expanding – to provide them with more inspiring and educational content to help them live their best lives. We’re looking for a digital content expert who’d like to join our dream team in building She Leads Africa into the number one destination for smart and ambitious African women. This role is only open in Lagos, Nigeria and Cape Town, South Africa only. Reporting Structure: The Digital Content Associate will report to the Head of Content. They will also be responsible for managing a team of 2-3 fellows and additional staff related to large events or campaigns. Responsibilities: Be proactive about ensuring that SLA is a part of important conversations related to African women, business, career, and life Grow the number of Facebook and Twitter followers, and page engagement Lead weekly strategic meetings on content direction on SLA’s social media platforms Establish and deliver community engagement goals on a weekly and monthly basis Utilize data and analytics to drive decision making and advise social content and editorial decisions Oversee social content production and editing every week Develop new concepts and series for the community and seek out contributors Listen to our users and encouraging dialogue on our platforms Requirements: The ideal candidates will have an interest in building, growing and scaling communities. You don’t have to have official work experience doing this kind of work but we want someone who is passionate about digital content and can learn quickly. If this role is for you, you’ll be excited to work in a fast-paced environment and committed to working until the job is done. Specific requirements include: Intellectual curiosity and an interest in learning new skills Excellent English writing skills and the ability to adopt and change your style of writing Experience in building and growing communities across markets using a variety of content, marketing, and partnership strategies Knowledge of digital marketing strategies Social media savvy and being up to date on current trends Able to deliver on metrics-driven results and an understanding of analytics Graphic design and video editing skills are a major plus Benefits: Entry level salary with commission Opportunity to travel across Africa and interact with Africa’s leading voices and entrepreneurs Work with a moderately fun team who’s just tryna change lives and help women get that schmoney. Applications close on December 10, 2017. Submit your application materials here: [typeform_embed type=”embed” url=”https://sheleadsafrica.typeform.com/to/tq3W4X”] Unfortunately due to the number of applications we receive, we will not be able to contact everyone who applies. We will not be able to answer additional questions via email.
3 things to do when your academic background and your career are worlds apart
There is an indescribable joy that is experienced by a Nigerian who has just graduated from an institution of higher education – what a delightful feeling! No more paying of exorbitant school fees. No more buying of handouts from lecturers under duress. No more dodging from sleazy lecturers. No more coping with below-par study situations. Surely, things can only get better from then onward. However, when the time comes to seek out and secure gainful employment, the graduate would soon realize that she has jumped from the fabled frying pan into the fire of reality. If one was disillusioned by the undergraduate experience, a greater disillusionment awaits such an individual when faced with the task of finding a job which matches their actual field of study. According to the National Bureau of Statistics, Nigeria’s unemployment rate rose to 7.5% from 6.4% in the first three months of 2015. There are therefore too few jobs for too many graduates, and so graduates often have to grab any job they are able to get with both hands. A lot of my contemporaries who work in the Nigerian banking sector, for instance, did not study anything remotely related to banking or finance in their various tertiary institutions. They studied courses like Microbiology and Applied Chemistry; they took banking jobs because those were the jobs available, not necessarily because they had a deep love for finance. So, what do you do if you find yourself in such a situation? Here are 3 ways to make the most out of it. Adapt your learned knowledge to your current job For instance, if you are a Political Science graduate who has, after a long job search, gotten a job in a Bank as a Marketing Executive. You should try to think about the aspects of studying Political Science which you could adapt to your current situation. These would include things like Being able to undertake thorough research (in this situation, research on your target market). Being apt at writing reports. The ability to analyze situations from different points of view. When you approach the situation in this manner, you would perform well at your job, and you may even start to see it as a long-term career, rather than a temporary situation. There is an added bonus if it turns out that your personality happens to match your job; so if it just so happens that you’re very charming and persuasive, your job as a marketer would be more tolerable for you. Sell yourself For this step to work very well for you, you must first ensure that you put in your best in any job situation in which you find yourself for the duration of time you are there. Then, if you decide that you want to move on from the job, you have to pitch yourself as an expert in your current job, who just happens to also be an expert in your academic field of study. If I was the hiring manager of an organization, I would be very intrigued by a candidate who is a trained microbiologist who currently works as a marketer at a bank. It is now up to you, as a job applicant, to really demonstrate how those experiences would make you a very desirable candidate for the advertised role. So, you must always ensure that you are excellent at your job, even if it isn’t where you thought you would end up; that excellence would most likely be your stepping stone to future success. Don’t give up It is very easy to get disillusioned when, after months or years of searching for a job, you end up with a job that is unrelated to your field of study. Some graduates end up seeing the job they have gotten as one which they are okay with doing on a long-term basis. If this is not the case for you, please do not fret or get discouraged. Keep applying for the job which you desire, while making sure that your skills in your field of study are up to date. Take online courses if possible. Read up on new trends in that area of expertise. Try to get a mentor to guide you on your journey. If it is possible, try to volunteer in some way to keep your knowledge in that area up to date. Whatever you do, try not to be sad about the situation. While you do all this, you must strive to maintain optimal professionalism at your current job. Having a job which doesn’t have anything to do with your field of study might be source of irritation, but not having a job at all is an even worse situation. Have you experienced such a situation on your quest to become a #MotherlandMogul? Kindly share your experiences in the comments section below. Don’t give up!
Odunayo Eweniyi: I kept going on interviews but was never hired
Odunayo Eweniyi’s story is one that is probably familiar to most young graduates. Leave school excited for the real world. Apply for several roles and go out on interviews. Wait to hear back from the interviewers. Keep waiting. Keep waiting. Keep waiting. Give up hope and become a permanent indentation on your mother’s couch. Instead of just wasting away until a job found her, she went out and created her own job by forming PushCV. The Chapter Lead for the Nigerian chapter of Women in Tech Africa, wanted to create a platform where qualified candidates could get connected directly to job opportunities and cut through the delays. Odunayo shares with us where she thinks most young Nigerians struggle with getting a job, how she’s differentiating her company and what she believes is the most important element of a CV. Why did you start PushCV? We started PushCV right out of university. When I graduated I went on a couple of interviews and I never even heard back, despite being told that I passed the interviews. It went on like that for a bit, plenty of CV submissions and no call backs. So PushCV was borne of a personal need. I wanted to be more involved in how employment is done. We started PushCV because we thought that employment and recruitment could be done better. Every other service was going digital, so why couldn’t recruitment move with the times? Hence we launched PushCV for people – both employers and job seekers – to fully harness the power of technology in the search for the perfect candidate or the perfect job. In what areas do you think most young Nigerians struggle when it comes to finding a job? I have heard employers complain that great candidates don’t exist and I have heard job seekers talk about the lack of jobs. While there’s a degree of truth in these claims, the problem is more of a divide between the employers and job seekers. The struggle is essentially in two places. Employers struggle to find the best suited candidates for their vacancy, and the truth is that sometimes, those candidates do not exist. As a result job seekers struggle to mold themselves into the cast of the perfect candidate. But really the biggest problem is employability. Most of the graduates in the country currently lack the technical or soft skills that would satisfy prospective employers. That is why PushCV is committed to bridging that divide. We created the Elite Employee Quest for this purpose – to isolate the already built up candidates and put them in front of employers; and to work with and on the jobseekers that are lacking in some respect, and make them better. We aim to make every candidate into the perfect candidate by building all aspects of them – soft skills, innate employability, interpersonal skills etc. We do not send candidates who have not met our rigorous standards for interviews. How do you ensure Push CV stands out against all of the other job search platforms on the market? We never stop innovating because we listen to our customers. We believe that we can only move forward when we are fulfilling a pain, not just a need. We have a robust feedback system that we use to track customer preferences of employers and job seekers. What do they want? How can we make it better? Those are the questions that we answer and use those answers to develop a constantly evolving product. What can we expect to see from Push CV over the next 6 months? Over the next 6 months, I think that you can expect to see us gaining an even stronger foothold in the market. The next 6 months will see us pushing the boundaries and bringing better alternatives into the very traditional world of recruitment. Unemployment is one of the biggest problems that Nigeria is facing. As someone who is committed to education and labor and I feel privileged to run a startup that wants to solve this problem. I think that the one thing I can promise is that we will do our absolute best to bring unemployment to the barest minimum. We often employ unconventional methods, so people can expect more outside the box thinking from PushCV over the next few months, What is the most important element to a CV? Here, I should tell you that it’s your “Work Experience” or your “Education”. But really it’s just the top third of your first page. The average resume gets about six seconds of review time before it’s either retained or pitched. So, you need to make a compelling argument for yourself in those six seconds. If the top of your resume works hard and quickly makes your case, you will be retained for review consideration.
Five types of employees you want to fire immediately
We all have that one person in our squad or team that we could live without. They want the worst for you, but you want the best for them. You want a team as synchronized Travel Noire‘s, they want a mosh pit. You’re thinking savings, they’re thinking spending. In short, you two are on different pages. And so you fire them, which is what any reasonable person would do if they cared about saving their business venture. And if you have the below mentioned five employees on your team, please fire them all before they poison the well. 1. The Social Media Butterfly These are people who wake and sleep on social media. Give them a day to research five smoothie ingredients for a new flavour, and all they’ll come with are a bunch of IMDB tab sheets and a desktop background image of Idris Elba. 2. The Raver Everyone has a bad day, but that doesn’t mean we should scream like banshees at work. Home, yes. Work, no. No on wants to work with someone who stresses them all day, every day with strident remarks or caustic put-downs. 3. The Warlord These are career trouble makers, and all-around instigators. They’re ready to fight at the slightest perceived provocation, sowing seeds of discord in the office. If you dream of fostering a collaborative and friendly work environment, then caution them to cut it out, and if they don’t, give them the sack. 4. The Know-It-All Spews a never-ending stream of suggestions and unsolicited advice, but barely listens to second opinions nor take corrections. This kind of attitude breeds resentment and could spell trouble for your company if they’re their job requires them to liaise with clients. Encyclopedias are books, as in inanimate objects. So if your employee fancies themselves one, you have every right to be worried. And what do we do with worrisome employees? We fire them. That’s right, we fire them. 5. The Indecisive is afraid of mistakes and wants to run every full stop by you. They can’t take any initiative, and need constant reassurance and feedback. If you enjoy baby-sitting adults, keep them. If not, let them go or you’ll be doing their job and yours. Who else will you fire? Any personalities we didn’t mention? Care making a list?