BrightWork

Creating connections between young people and employers in Nigeria.

We are solving the problem of youth unemployment in Nigeria. We are disrupting the "job board" by creating an all-in-one platform that trains and finds jobs for unemployed youth in Nigeria.

We understand that there is more to the youth unemployment problem than claiming that “there are not enough jobs” for the 13 million young people entering the Nigerian job market each year. While this is an issue, with only 3-million jobs created each year, we are choosing to focus on the high-employee turnover and the millions of unfilled roles that are plaguing the Nigerian economy. This problem can be solved by engaging with college students and graduates to create a pipeline from education to employment.  

According to employment researchers in Nigeria, universities in the country are not equipping their students satisfactorily for the 21st-century work environment. This leads to high-turnover in the workforce, hire-shy employers and unemployed young people. Employers are grossly dissatisfied with the skills of graduates and distrust the veracity of their education and the institutions through which they achieve their degrees. This has led to a fracture in the job-seeking and employment market in Nigeria. Unless you graduate from one of the 5 trusted colleges (based on PR as there are no league tables in Nigeria’s college system) or have a direct connection to an employer (nepotism), it is highly unlikely that you will gain sustainable employment. Most Nigerian college graduates remain unemployed 5 years after their graduation, living on less than $5PPP, for these reasons.

We’ve carried out semi-structured interviews with employers, college deans, college students, and other stakeholders including government officials and NGOs, resulting in the model we are pitching today. Employers and job-seekers need a place that is trustworthy, independent of the school system, unbiased and objective, where they can advertise roles and screen applicants. We took on that mantle and are producing something that revolutionises the way we hire in Nigeria, making it possible for qualified candidates across the country to gain roles they would ordinarily have been disqualified for in favour of nepotism. 

BrightWork is more than a job board; it is introducing meritocracy to the Nigerian job-seeking market. 

Our Ai based job matching service algorithm, is fed by our career counsellors who work with each individual applicant to take them through our objective qualitative and quantitative employability skills assessments.

The career counsellors also work with each candidate to determine their short and long term career goals so that they can map their individual career journey on our platform. Our algorithm suggests certified free/cheap online training resources in hard and soft skills, automatically updating their profiles with their progress.  

We provide demographically “blind” information to employers, giving women and other minorities a stronger chance to win positions. 

Our web and app based platform is primarily powered by Ai and Machine learning to ensure that our users get the best possible job match for their skills.

Our online assessments and virtually delivered upskilling tools and resources allow us to reach our users despite Nigerian infrastructure issues. Our technology also allows us to create demographically “blind” profiles that encourage unbiased hiring.

The data points we gather from researchers, surveys and our users will be used to educate our systems and provide the best resources to ensure the employment and career progression of each user. 

Nigeria has a very large number of certified HR professionals relative to the rest of the world. We intend to form partnerships with HR professional associations to encourage their users to begin using our platform as their primary outsourced tool for their recruitment operations.

We intend to help 1000 young people that have been unemployed for over 3 years gain entry level positions in Nigeria’s SMEs and corporations. We will do this by forming strategic partnerships with colleges across the country, working with colleges seniors and recent graduates to complete our employability assessment and on-board them to our platform. 

By year 2, BrightWork will be introduced in neighbouring West African countries, Ghana and Cameroon, the latter will become the basis of our francophone Africa takeover.

In Nigeria (year 3), we’ll pilot Bright Futures and The Bright Fellowship, to launch in years 4 and 5 respectively.

Bright Futures is an internship program for senior high school and college students to gain 3-week summer jobs at corporations and SMEs.

Bright Fellowship, for BrightWork Alumni, is an equity-based accelerator program that aims to build sector disruptors that go on to hire 10s or hundreds of unemployed young people through Bright Work. 

In the first 12 months, we will focus our engagement outreach efforts on the following:

Colleges – partnering with colleges across Nigeria, we will gain direct access to recent graduates and students in their penultimate and graduating years of college. We will onboard them onto our platform through these strategic partnerships.

Direct Outreach – we will reach out to employers that are already using job boards in Nigeria and show the why our solution is more effective in the long term; both cost and impact on employee turnover.

We have worked with over 100 college students and graduates under the age of 30 in Nigeria to provide a prototype version of our career counselling model. Through our sessions, the graduates gained a clearer understanding of their short term and long term carer goals and learned a few methods they could use to navigate their entry into the workforce.

The goal of this offline testing period was to ensure customer satisfaction with the model as the information we gain in the career counselling sessions are a large part of the algorithm that powers our innovation. 

In 12 months, we expect to have helped 1000 college graduates gain entry-level positions in 250 Nigerian companies.

1. The graduates will be able to start saving for things like their first home, their weddings and other key moments in their lives.

2. The companies will have greater opportunity for long-term sustainability as our service will reduce the high staff turnover most Nigerian companies currently experience due to poor hiring practices.

In 3 years, we expect to be serving 350,000 graduates, due to strategic partnerships with the universities, NGOs and government bodies we’re currently in talks with.

For the past 7 months our founder has lived, and worked with organisations, in Nigeria, like DAWN Commission, a representative of the 6 South Western Nigerian states, and has advised the team leads at ECOWAS on the development of a strategy that aims to reduce youth unemployment across West Africa. 

Her work as a world class researcher at the London School of Economics gave her the opportunity to develop, lead and manage large social policy programs and interventions with a budget ranging from £30,000 to £4M. In her time at LSE, her work was quoted by the UK’s Prime Minister.

Candidates will pay a membership fee to access premium support which will give them access to our algorithm powered professional development resource suggestions that correspond with their career goals, quarterly career counselling sessions, assessments, re-take opportunities, job advert notifications and pre-interview briefings. We will produce both free and paid training modules for all candidates. We expect every candidate to average $6 a month on our platform.

Objective assessments are a paid service. Non-members will pay to access assessment study resources and to take each assessment. We are also developing our assessments so that they can take on the prestige of the LSAT, GMAT and GRE; assessments that are trusted and can exist as an independent paid service in the long-term. We expect every graduate across Africa to value the impact a high score on our assessment will have on their chances for employment.

At a rate starting at $30 per job advert, we are working to provide measurable results to the employers that choose us. In the long-term we intend to develop HR software that can be licensed to employers across Africa that will give them the opportunity to white-label our service and integrate it into their HR apparatus.

We hope to tap into connections Solve has in other low income countries to gain new insights and understanding about how the youth unemployment problem is being solved in their own communities. Through the support of our fellow solvers and the Solve program’s teaching and resources, we hope to be challenged in our ability to address the problem effectively using artificial intelligence and machine learning.

We want to tap into the depth of knowledge at the organisation to ensure that we are taking advantage of technological advancements that will allow us to maximise our impact while expanding our reach. 

We have pent some time speaking with technology experts in the UK and Nigeria, however we would appreciate the focused support of a Solve Mentor who could help BrightWork navigate our use of technology.

We intend to use impact figures to advocate for colleges to implement policies that enable college students and graduates to gain access to our services so that they can experience a college to employment pipeline. Speaking with individuals that have used impact data to affect corporate policy would be helpful.