Eric Lauer runs all that’s called Classifieds on Jumia, and he is also a member of the Jumia Executive Committee. His businesses include 3 vertical classifieds – Real Estate (Jumia House), Jobs (Jumia Jobs), Cars (Jumia Car) and a General classifieds (Jumia Deals). Eric who has been in Uganda at least 5 times, visits every 4 to 5 months. He was in Uganda recently to visit the Ugandan Jumia team and see their progress.
According to Eric, the idea each time is first; to meet key partners, heads of the HR in the recruitment business. The second objective is to meet end users – people that are using the Jumia platform and the third reason is to meet the team, all the leadership of Jumia companies here to share news and get updates.
UGO Uganda had the opportunity to interact with him this time around and learn more about the progress Jumia has been making in Uganda.
Briefly explain to us how ‘Classifieds’ works?
It’s a Classifieds ads platform. So we facilitate the connection between the two sides of the equation.
On one side, you have end users looking for a job or a property. We provide transparency on price and the largest assortments of jobs and properties in Uganda.
On the other side of the equation, you have our partners who are the recruiters, agents, companies that are recruiting, developers, that will pay a subscription to get or access future clients.
And you will find that Jumia House and Jumia Jobs are the largest platforms in the country for finding houses and jobs, respectively.
When it comes to ‘General Classfieds’ however, we are not the leader. General Classifieds is more like OLX. It’s for the individuals. General Classifieds is a bit of everything and sometimes there’s a lot of scam, because you buy from people you don’t know and products might not work as well as you expected.
That’s what sets Jumia House and Jumia Jobs apart. It’s all about trust.
We build relationships with professional agents for a few years. It’s not a scam for jobs where people ask for money to send for you applications. We work directly with heads of HR, recruiters, of both international and local companies. We know them and we know they are trusted. And I have to say East Africa is working well for us.
How is Jumia Deals performing?
In Uganda, Jumia deals is smaller that OLX, however, it is already the leader in most West African countries.
You see with classifieds we have two types. We have horizontal classfieds, which means horizontal by all the categories that you have. And then you have vertical, which is just one category.
Take for example – dating. So if dating is one of the many categories on your platform, then we look at it as horizontal. If it’s the only category you have, then we look at it as a vertical classifieds.
How has the African population, especially the young professionals, reacted to Jumia Jobs?
Do they utilize it the way you hoped they would?
Overall, to be quite frank, the reception has been actually positive on both sides of the job market.
First of all if we look at the job seekers, we discovered that the formal sector jobs are limited in some countries. 10-20% are from the formal and 80% are from the informal sector.
Usually when people graduate from university, they are all looking and craving to have these top formal sector jobs.
So now we are giving them access to these formal sector jobs, which they wouldn’t easily access before. Jobs were not very public and if you were not born in the right family or did not have the right connections, you would hardly access these jobs. This is the first reason why people are positive to our product.
The second is because it is free and will always be free. We feel that people deserve having a job and they should always keep looking for jobs that will suit their life the best. Luckily, they have access to a lot of jobs with transparency.
Three, we give career advice through our job journal, where people can read high quality content. For example, how to prepare for an interview or what kind of qualifications and skills do you need for a certain job. This is why I think we’re getting the love of the professionals.
The fourth reason is trust. People know that on our platform, it’s only serious companies that are really and genuinely recruiting, so this is how it’s gotten positive reception from the professionals and job seekers.
On the other side of the table, from the recruiters, they really welcomed the fact that the platform helps them save a lot of time. It’s incredible! Before, you’d find HR people sitting behind huge piles of paper CVs that they needed to read through and screen, by hand.
But now, you receive … let’s say 500 applications, you put some filters based on the criteria that you want, then you end up with about 20 or 30 applications that are really relevant basing on the position.
Second, they have access to a lot more candidates when it’s online. They have a wider pool of talent to find the ‘gem’.
Third reason is that we have a CV database that is the biggest in the country with about 100,000 CVs. So it means that if for example, you are recruiting for a Newspaper, you can choose from hundreds of qualified journalists. If you are in the oil industry you can choose from hundreds of qualified engineers allowing them also to head hunt directly.
Are there any challenges you face with the job seekers?
I think there’s a big challenge and usually we get it from the recruiters. They find that a lot of young graduates are lacking some professional skills.
But we usually tell them that they can always provide training, invest in the youth right from the beginning. Because when there’s a steep learning curve, the right training and mentoring in place, then people really quickly gain experience and ability.
Second thing, a lot of job seekers are completely lost. Usually they are in their 20s, they did a general degree and they don’t know the opportunities they should look out for. They don’t know which industry they should enter. So you find a lot them applying to all the jobs they see. That’s why in our job journal we are trying to push the knowledge so that people can have better understanding of what they are applying to, what it entails and if it suits their personality.
How has the process of making the Jumia Jobs platform available to SMEs turned out?
SMEs have two constraints. First one, is that they have erratic recruitment needs. May be they will need like 3 now and then nothing for the rest of the year. The second constraint for them is budget.
So to adapt to this need of SMEs we decided to design what we call the ‘Freemium’ model which is basically two words fused together ‘free’ and ‘premium’. What it means is that it’s free for them to use the platform and to get applications and then we will only charge if they need some premium options like CV screening, some added visibility option and easier head hunting in our CV databases. So apart from that, the rest will be free. So this is how we are tackling the SMEs in Uganda and this is how we are making sure that they also have access to quality talent and candidates that will help their businesses.
And so far the result is that every day we have about 1 SME that is registering with the platform and creating jobs. I think this progress because at the time we started, we were close to zero. And now because of word of mouth, because it’s free and you can recruit anytime and because the brand Jumia is becoming very popular in Uganda, now we are getting this result of at least one SME a day which is very positive.
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