A free e-book and podcasts provide talent seeking career opportunities with entertaining tips on how to get hired.
The challenges of the labor market in West Africa are particular. On the one hand, there are companies that are struggling to find executives and managers, whether on the continent or beyond. On the other hand, there are talents who have difficulty in getting recruited, especially those who want to change careers, to reorient themselves.
The latter find it difficult to highlight their profile, to find the professional opportunities that correspond to them. They do not know the channels of access to these opportunities, as well as the specificities of these channels, of which confidentiality is one of the main characteristics. They sometimes ignore the realities of the job market in Africa, or lack connections, as shown in a survey carried out by Looka in Africa last April (32% of self-employed workers surveyed). It must be said that they have not been trained in this, or they have difficulty in making sense of things with the flood of information available online.
To help these Talents looking for a new opportunity, headhunter Yann Hazoumè has just published a free e-book. Entitled Understanding how a headhunter works, the e-book helps to understand the way of working of this intermediary between recruiter and recruit who represents 12% of recruitment sources in Africa, according to Looka. “In this first book, I portrayed the headhunter and his environment, so that the candidate gets to know this increasingly essential actor in the professional transition”, explains the recruitment specialist who has supported hundreds of executives and leaders to (re) position their careers in Africa.
The book clearly explains the differences between headhunter and recruitment firm, how to recognize a good headhunter, know his challenges and constraints, the mistakes to avoid.
“To get noticed or to improve your chances of convincing recruiters, you have to prepare well,” says Yann Hazoumè. This involves classic and usual tools that are however misused: the CV or LinkedIn profile, often far too long and detailed, as shown in a study of recruiters who spend around five seconds per profile! However, knowing how to write a resume is considered the first skill to have when looking for a job according to candidate surveys …
To complete the e-book and give more advice to candidates, Yann Hazoumè has produced Chroniques de Recrutologie: podcasts also available for free on the Internet, on the main podcasting platforms (Spotify, Apple Podcast, Google Podcast, Deezer, Amazon Music, Soundcloud…). Short, humorous content, to smile about real anecdotes but also to reflect on the lessons of African wisdom applied to recruitment. On the agenda: Fela Kuti, Wagner and lengthy resumes, job references one should do without, embarrassing job interview situations, and a dozen more enlightening stories.
With the e-book and these podcasts, the Talents thus have some accessible, useful and entertaining tools to perfect their job search techniques, while waiting for another e-book that will go a little further and explain, with examples and practical cases, how executives of the professional diaspora, specifically, can better prepare their return to the continent and be detected.
