Journey with EASE (East Africa Social Enterprise)
A simple and effective jobs board for impact talent in East Africa
January, 2016
Holden Bonwit
Background
Holden was looking to relocate to Nairobi in a half year and started to build out a
network there to secure employment, with an eye towards early-stage and socially
impactful businesses. Through a friend-of-a-friend at Cambridge in the UK, he was
put in touch with Niraj, a Nairobi local, and Investment Director at NovaStar, a
Nairobi-based VC with social impact goals. Niraj is also a natural connector, and was
happy to keep Holden in the loop on job openings in Kenya through his mailing list,
concurrently hoping to help his friends fill talent gaps in their East Africa
organizations.
It turns out that Niraj has been instrumental in linking impact organizations to each
other, to business & financial support, and to talent for the past few years. He’s been
sharing a monthly email newsletter and organizing sporadic social gatherings to
foster the community and help friendly organizations. His newsletter-cocktail
comprises two parts dark comedic public commentary and one part fresh impact
jobs listings, topped with a dash of events around town.
While Niraj started the mailing list as a way to bring people together over drinks to
discuss common impact challenges, the community in Nairobi has now matured
enough that organizations are hosting similar events independently (such as the
One Acre Fund Happy Hour). The newsletter remains, however, as an entertaining
look at Nairobi life, and as a way to share talent needs among movers and shakers
who may know of talent available in the region, or candidates who are open to
moving to the region.
Project genesis
Fast-forwarding about 12 months, Holden found himself happily employed in
Nairobi, and collating and forwarding Niraj’s newsletter with job descriptions to
other job seekers interested to work in East African social enterprises. While
information flowed freely in Nairobi, these email attachments seemed to be very
valuable social capital to career changers, or outsiders looking to enter the network
(geographic or otherwise). As Holden’s network built, the amount of emailsearching and attachment-forwarding to job-seekers became untenable and he
recognized the community’s fragmented communication position. He recognized the
need for a solution: a single place to post and read job opportunities, and to share
with new arrivals and career changers.
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After a bit of discussion, Holden and Niraj discussed the option of setting up an
online ‘landing spot’ to easily reference such positions in the future. There simply
wasn’t any existing portal which captured the current, relevant opportunities.
Holden agreed to take the first steps to make a minimum viable product website,
and Niraj agreed to write some content to see if it brought value to the community.
Prototype
As a mechanical engineer, Holden was in the unique position of knowing enough to
make a very ugly, but functional prototype website. Using only free tools, Holden
scraped together Google sites, a Google form to submit job openings, and Google
sheets to rank the openings for freshness and to screen for appropriate quality. A
screenshot is attached in Appendix 3.
The prototype website launched on 15 Aug 2015 and remained in place for the next
4 months. Over that time, the newsletter garnered 76 additional signups; roughly
one per. Niraj and Holden used these metrics, along with verbal feedback from the
community to decide to invest more time in the site. Here are a few actual email
comments of on the prototype website:
“Awesome initiative! A social enterprise jobs board for Nairobi
specifically would be super useful... I see you guys are getting some
traction too; I just posted a role as well!”
“Thanks, Holden. That website is super helpful!”
“Site looks good- does the job. And wow, that’s a lot of openings you
have got listed there already!”
During the prototype time period, the team also surveyed “competitor” websites to
ensure there wasn’t already a suitable solution that allowed job seekers to easily
filter positions by social impact organization type (non-profit or for-profit social
enterprise), as well as filter by East African geography. A list of similar, though
deficient websites is attached in Appendix 1.
Build and Launch
Holden recruited two more professionals to join the team on a volunteer basis:
Chris Rex – technical background in Computer Science and recent grad of
Oxford’s MBA program; moved to Nairobi in late 2015 and seeking impactful work
Karibu Nyaggah – founder of Caytree ***add description***
Chris agreed to build the bulk of the website and utilized WordPress and associated
plug-in tools. Karibu agreed to host the website on an empty domain he had,
Journey.co.ke and the team agreed to split all costs for the time being. Screenshots
of the front page and of the jobs listings are attached in Appendix 4.
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The team decided to launch the new website under the name “Journey,” as it
conveyed positive career progress in an easy-to-remember website name; if the
community gave significant traction to the site and negative feedback on the name,
iteration was possible, with some considered alternatives in Appendix 2. The URL
would be Journey.co.ke
After about a month of testing, building, backing up, and a few breakfast gatherings,
the team was very happy with the site and eager to get outside feedback. Due to the
massive slowdown in hiring (and business in general) which takes place over the
Christmas holiday period in East Africa, the team decided on a soft-launch to Niraj’s
mailing list before the break, and a wider publication in the new year.
The team compiled a comprehensive zero-dollar marketing blast to go live in the
new year, including reaching out to startups, investors, consulting organizations,
industry associations (such as ANDE, East Africa chapter), and personal networks.
The communications will include second-layer tools that enable the wider spread of
the tool; for example, emails to local investors will include pre-written text that they
can forward to their portfolio companies to suggest advertising open positions.
Status
For the time being, the only maintenance required on the website is:
Ensure the website is up / hosted
Add jobs/opportunities from friends’ organizations
Approve/disapprove submitted by third parties
Near-term goals are to maintain growth in newsletter signups as well as job
postings through organic growth, word of mouth, and very minor Facebook
solicitations. Members of the community have already started posting roles
independently, which is a good sign for the future. The team will continue to solicit
feedback and to monitor analytics metrics.
Longer term, the team is considering replicating the impact jobs board in other
geographies, and would seek local key stakeholder buy-in before rolling out, to build
on existing networks and increase chances for success.
While the team feels excited that they’ve been able to bring a new solution to the
community, there’s also a feeling that in the 21st century, more and more job seekers
will look for impact roles, and of course the larger, more traditional job boards will
include a specific filter for impact roles. The question at that time will revolve
around how Journey will work with these players, and whether one will feed the
other with content.
While it’s much too early to call the project a success, the team has gotten ample
positive feedback and is excited to maintain and grow the website as necessary.
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Appendix 1: Similar impact-related job listing websites and characteristics
#
Name
Notes
1
Google Group on
Soc Ent jobs
Too much to sift through if job seeker is focused in East Africa
2
Escape The City
Top competitor site; not geographically focused, a bit hard to find
EA/Kenya stuff
3
The GIIN Jobs
Emphasizes keywords & location in search
4
NextBillion Jobs
A bit hard to find EA/Kenya stuff; Has "Featured Jobs" at top; each job
has a tag, not used?
5
Idealist
A bit hard to find EA/Kenya stuff
6
NetImpact Jobs
Location search is tough
7
Brighter Monday
Wide range of sectors/roles
8
KenyaMOJA jobs
Wide range; redirects to JobWebKenya, CareerPointKenya, etc.
9
JobWebKenya
Generic / wide range / self-hosted
10 Corporate Staffing headhunter; mid to higher level
11 CareerPointKenya Has job alert emails w/o keywords; organized by category plaintext list
11 Many UK Sites
Tons of sites in the UK. Worth investigating more?
12 Devex Jobs
Quiet site with only 30 jobs
Appendix 2: Potential names
A short list of some of the keywords / names that were considered
EASE: East Africa Social Enterprise
Journey
Strive
Impact now
Brighter Impact / Impact Monday
First Step
Connect
sKazi (the s is for social and “kazi” means “work” in Swahili)
KazImpact
Blended Talent
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Appendix 3: Screenshot of Prototype website (functional, but ugly)
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Appendix 4: Screenshot: Launch website front page & jobs listings page
Continued below
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Sample jobs listing below
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