Fuzu Nigeria // Firm Enters Lagos to Bridge Skill Gaps

Fuzu, an online employment and career development platform has launched Fuzu Nigeria with an objective to disrupt how organizations find top talent and provide a trusted career partner for ambitious job seekers who stop at nothing to achieve success.

With the support of other partners and amazing team, Fuzu Nigeria becomes the firm’s 3rd African Market after Kenya and Uganda.

Speaking at the launch in Lagos, the Chief Executive Officer of Fuzu, Jussi Hinkkanen, said that he was  super excited to be launching Fuzu in Nigeria, Africa’s largest job market.

“We’ve been on the ground in Nigeria for close to a year now running extensive research on how best to support job seekers in their careers and businesses in their search for qualified talent in this market. One of our values at Fuzu is “Eating Mars For Breakfast” and our expansion to Nigeria is by far one of the biggest ways we’ve demonstrated this value. I couldn’t be more proud of the team” he added.

Fuzu new the platform will allow job seekers in Nigeria irrespective of their level of education and seniority, to plan their future, learn new skills and competencies and ultimately find a job that best matches their ambitions and background.

He said the service continuously encourages and guides job seekers in the right direction by providing them with personalised recommendations and guaranteed feedback on every application.

Nigeria becomes the third country that Fuzu launches in after Kenya and Uganda. Fuzu provides a set of sophisticated tools for identifying best matching candidates via powerful search and recruitment solutions and automated analysis of curriculum vitae.

The platform integrates online psychometric testing and talent profiling of candidates to the application process, thus making it easy to find candidates that best match the requirements.

Job Market in Nigeria

Nigeria, is one of the most populated countries in Africa with  a population of over 100 million & understanding the labor market is crucial to achieve Nigeria’s aspiration to lift its population out of poverty by 2030 – an ambitious objective, since even before the COVID-19 crisis around 4 in 10 Nigerians were living below the national poverty line according to World Bank.

Spotlight Feature: Fuzu on their four year journey

With these numbers, its evident that jobs crisis makes hiring a herculean task in Nigeria , given the country’s anaemic job growth, jobseekers dwarf the number of available jobs.

Every year, the lopsided nature of the labor market gets worse. Although Nigeria’s job creation rose to 450,000 jobs in 2018, offsetting job losses to a limited extent from the previous year, an estimated 1.8m young people enter the job market annually.

About Fuzu

Fuzu is a Kiswahili verb meaning ‘to succeed’ and ‘to become competent. It is a career development platform and our core mission is to support career builders (job seekers) build meaningful and fulfilling careers.

They also support companies to efficiently manage the recruitment process, by providing a holistic approach to talent sourcing and management.

Fuzu is also a mobile-friendly service that can be accessed with all devices, from low-end handsets to smartphones, tablets, and personal computers, via an Internet browser, and allows users to learn about different career options.

Additionally, users will have access to more than 100 courses in various competence areas from basic work skills to topics such as entrepreneurship among others.

The organization joined Nairobi Garage in September 2015 and has been an active member ever since. They have continually aimed to change the landscape of job search and recruitment in Africa, providing AI-powered personalized guidance to individual users, and talent acquisition and data services to organizations.

Over the last five years, it has become the most popular career development platform in Kenya and has expanded to Uganda in 2018. In early 2020, they raised a EUR3.4 million (US$3.86 million) Series A funding round. Later in the same year, Fuzu was listed on Holon IQ’s first annual EdTech 50 in September 2020.

Initially, the main challenge Fuzu has faced was getting the buy-in from employers who were still used to the traditional methods of recruitment. Luckily for the organization, the world is now evolving to the digitization and most companies are appreciating the importance of digitizing the recruitment process and this shift of mindset has worked in our favor.

Fuzu’s ambition remains to revolutionize how job markets operate and how people build careers. The organization continues to grow into the go-to platform for professionals, irrespective of their level of seniority or educational background.