Regional Recruiting Specialist - East Africa

Position Overview 

Do you have an eye for spotting top talent? Are you a strong recruiter with experience across many functions, including senior roles? Do you enjoy getting creative and  tapping into your inner marketer to test new strategies for sourcing hard-to-find talent? Do you consider yourself a true partner who is focused on creating a delightful experience; both for candidates and hiring managers? Does the prospect of helping to build teams for a growth-stage, highly innovative non-profit social enterprise excite you? 

Educate!, a high-growth and award-winning non-profit social enterprise, has an exciting opening for a Regional Recruiting Specialist who will play a critical role in ensuring we attract, hire and retain the best employees while growing a strong talent pipeline. As the Regional Recruiting Specialist, you’ll apply your experience sourcing and hiring top talent to shape the team that will drive growth at an award-winning social enterprise.

The right person for this role is

• A self-starter who is passionate about finding top candidates through various channels
• Willing to take on new types of work, even without prior experience or direct supervision
• Comfortable with ambiguity; able to operate effectively in a changing context
• Able to build strong relationships with partners and colleagues
• A great communicator i.e speaks & writes clearly and effectively to a diverse audience
• Excellent at organizational skills and follow-through
• Self-aware, has a sense of ownership and ability to lead projects independently
• Has hands-on experience with full-cycle recruitment using various interview techniques and evaluation methods
• Experience with multiple outreach sourcing strategies to proactively source candidates
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Sound like you or someone you know? Apply at this link. Keep reading or visit our career page to learn more about Educate!

About Educate! 

What if there was a way to measurably change the trajectory of the lives of youth across Africa? Since its launch in 2009, Educate! has worked to do just this, delivering outsized impacts at scale and at disproportionately low cost, through a product-led approach to youth development. As a disruptive, not-for-profit, social enterprise, our team leverages an obsession with evidence and entrepreneurial drive to tackle one our planet's greatest challenges - unlocking the potential of its youngest continent. 

Educate!’s core model combines training in key skills with access to practical experience starting a business and mentorship, a formula that has been validated by several independent evaluations. This model is distributed through products targeting two lead channels. First, Educate! works with governments to help reform education systems at scale through policy change, teacher behavior change and tech-enabled products targeting systems-level sustainability, while also working directly with select schools. Second, Educate! builds employment-focused boot camps and business support services targeting out-of-school youth left out of the education system. To date, more than 200,000 youth have been meaningfully impacted by this model across Uganda, Rwanda and Kenya and along the way Educate! has become the largest youth skills provider in East Africa.

Educate! is a team of over 160 largely African staff and 300 volunteer youth mentors. We prioritize building an engaging, fulfilling, and growth-oriented work environment. 50% of our top 30 leaders have been with us for over 5 years, 10+ alumni have started other organizations and 5 current or former team members were Acumen Fund East Africa fellows. 

We have been backed by top foundations and product leaders such as Imaginable Futures, Big Bang Philanthropy, Echoing Green, the 1st Google Employee’s foundation, the head of Google Search, and Rippleworks Foundation. Educate! won a 2018 Klaus J. Jacobs Prize and a 2015 WISE Award, and has been highlighted by Bill Gates, in the World Bank’s S4YE's Impact Portfolio, an Al Jazeera documentary, BBC, and The Brookings Institution as one of 14 case studies in their global scaling education learning initiative. Educate! was also selected by the UN’s Generation Unlimited as 1 of 20 innovative youth solutions and by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation as a Goalkeepers Accelerator. 

Educate!'s long-term vision is to design solutions that measurably impact millions of youth across Africa each year. 

Performance Objectives 

Recruiting

• Implement creative recruiting strategies to reach prospective applicants for high-level global and new country hires.
• Strengthening our unbiased hiring practices and educating our teams further on how to conduct team, culture, and technical interviews
• Liaising and maintaining relationships with recruitment channel partners including developing partnership agreements and monitoring the performance of these channels.
• Ensure a positive candidate experience for all applicants by responding to inquiries from prospective applicants timely and professionally.
• Screening and delivering top-tier candidates to interview by assessing, evaluating, and pre-screening candidates via CV reviews, calls, or emails
• Utilize the Applicant Tracking System (ATS) to support interview scheduling and building pipelines

Build candidate pipeline

• Build networks for best-in-class talent sourcing and internal pipelines for several key functions.
• Implement new strategies to further develop the Educate! Brand to prospective applicants.
• Develop and execute marketing and pipelining strategies for attracting and hiring critical talent
• Leverage market data to develop appropriate recruiting and sourcing strategies, including but not limited to social media and direct marketing tactics, resulting in a strong pipeline of qualified candidates
• Support in the implementation and management of recruiting systems
• Designing the interview process and ensuring the hiring team is diverse

Business partner to the hiring manager and stakeholders

• Thoroughly assess candidates and provide insightful feedback for hiring managers
• Manage the interview process, providing clear communication for candidates, managers and internal stakeholders
• Serve as a thought partner for hiring managers in making decisions on their candidates. While the hiring team gets to decide who joins their team, quality assurance, is a priority for you-  you will ask hiring teams the tough questions to ensure they are adequately assessing candidates and maintaining objectivity during the hiring process
• Partner with hiring managers to create job descriptions and define candidate profiles in order to develop recruitment strategies to attract qualified candidates
• Influence hiring manager to adhere to hiring process and technologies involved
• Leverage on data to develop insight on recruiting process, pipeline health and quality of hire

Country-Specific Recruiting Team Support

• Support our in-country teams in Rwanda, Kenya, and Uganda with recruiting needs as they arise.
• Ensuring every part of the application process is consistent across teams and platforms, from the job description to the offer or rejection

Qualifications 

• 5+ years of professional Recruiting/Staffing experience
• Measurable results recruiting top-tier talent from junior to executive-level roles
• Hands-on experience with full-cycle recruitment using various interview techniques and evaluation methods
• Experience with multiple outreach sourcing strategies to proactively source candidates
• Excellent interpersonal and communication skills and the ability to work effectively in a multicultural environment
• Attention to detail, organizational and prioritization skills  and ability to work in a fast-paced environment and handle a high volume of requests in an effective and timely manner
• Proficiency in MS Word, Excel, and email/internet
• Exceptional judgment in maintaining the confidentiality of employee and candidate information
• Fits our Five Cultural Tenets (see What is Educate! About? below); Learn more by looking at Educate!’s culture deck here

What Is Educate! About?

1. We’re ambitious. Are you? Educate! is growing fast, so new opportunities are opening up and expanding all the time. We’re inspired by people with drive, and we love to help them reach their full potential. We expect everyone at Educate! to contribute above and beyond their job description, grow their skills, and advance their careers, and we are committed to supporting our staff members on that journey.
2. We put Youth First, Impact-Obsessed - We never forget that Educate! exists to impact youth. We are purpose-driven. We obsess over impact daily and if it doesn’t lead to impact, we want nothing to do with it. We prioritize interacting with and listening to youth. We design and manage the organization to ensure every dollar creates transformative experiences that youth value. 
3. We Exceed Expectations - We take pride in going above and beyond to achieve the best results. When we know what needs to be done, we do it. We don’t wait to be asked and we don’t stop at what is asked of us. We look for solutions as much as we identify problems.
4. We Are Always Learning - We are committed to seeking and applying new knowledge and ideas. We stay open-minded. We know there is always another way and we are excited to learn about it. We continuously look for resources of all kinds from multiple disciplines. We try new things, experiment, grow, and improve. We invest in learning for ourselves and our teams.
5. We are One Team, Many Views - We say what we think while treating each other well. We believe that all people have the same inherent value and that diverse ideas and open dialogue fuel excellence. We constantly strive to create an environment where everyone can and does express themselves freely. We support and respect each other as people and colleagues.
6. We have the Startup Mindset - We will always keep innovating to grow our impact. We aspire to be game-changing. We never think “we have arrived” or “we’re done.” We question the status quo in our industry. We move fast and embrace change to move towards our long-term vision. We’re not afraid of failure. We interrogate anything that slows us down. 

Every person at Educate! — from interns to the executive director — is evaluated by how they live up to these five cultural tenets. They are at the core of how we achieve our mission and why we work as well as we do. 

Educate is committed to providing an inclusive and welcoming environment for all who interact in our community.  In creating this environment, we encourage people from a variety of cultures, backgrounds, and life experiences to join our diverse team.