Nigeria: 80 Percent of Online Jobs in Nigeria Are Frauds

Tope Niyi is the Head of Marketing and Products Development of Nigeria's online job portal, Careers24. In this exclusive interview with JONAH NWOKPOKU, he argues that most of the online jobs in Nigeria are from scammers looking to exploit desperate job seekers. He also spoke on Careers24's growth, market strategies and how job seekers can successfully explore the online job market to boost chances of employment. Excerpts

Careers24 has been in Nigeria's online job market for the past one year, what has your experience been and what is your general assessment of the online job market in Nigeria?
Our experience for the past one year has been a good one. We have seen a growth in our business and for a business that is still very young; the growth has been encouraging to our investors. When we came on board, our job stock was standing at about a thousand jobs, and we were projecting five thousand available vacancies which seemed an impossible task at the time but today we average about 11, 000 vacancies. In terms of visit also, we have noticed that over the past few months the number of people applying for jobs through our platform has increased to about 1,500 a day. That is huge growth for us, seeing that applications have gone up and that people are really applying for jobs. The number of our job stock has gone up which are good indicators of growth for us but these are still early days but we are seeing the kind of growth which we want to see at this stage.
What we have seen is that there are a lot of people looking for jobs. We have also found out that the jobs that are available in the market are jobs that require certain expertise or years of experience. We do not get to see a lot of jobs for entry levels. And if you look at the job pool, there is high number of people leaving school every day, millions of them, who cannot seem to find that first job that will enable them to get the required experience and then apply for those experienced jobs. We have also found that maybe it is also about the young graduates coming out of school, and then have too high expectations about the job market. There are people who just finished school and expect to start earning big money. They want the best jobs.
The oil companies cannot employ everybody. The banking sector is not what it used to be in terms of employment. So you find these high expectations and the reality is that the people that hire the largest numbers of entry level employees are the small and medium enterprises, SMEs and they cannot afford to pay the huge salaries that big and multinational corporations can afford to pay.
With the goal of beating the main player in the job market in Nigeria, have you made any significant progress in this direction?
To be honest, we are still a long way from getting there in terms of brand recognition. This year we ran a major campaign on television and radio. This has really helped to boost our image and brand equity in the marketplace. If you remember, Jobberman has over five years' head start. It is going to take time to catch up with Jobberman. But for us, beyond catching up with competition, one of the most important things for us and the reason why we are doing what we are doing is that we want to give recruiters and job seekers value. That is really important to us. Its always a game of numbers. In a marketplace, there is always going to be a number one and number two. Our job is going to be to increase the number of people who are using our platform and increase the kind of value satisfaction they get while using the platform.