Youth Recruitment Coordinator, Kenya

Position Overview 

Educate!, a fast-growing and award-winning social enterprise, is seeking a Youth Recruitment Coordinator to drive our youth recruitment strategies in Kenya as we work towards our organizational vision of measurably impacting millions of students across Africa each year. In this role, you’ll report to the Snr Youth Recruitment Manager and play a key role in designing, implementing, and optimizing recruitment systems and awareness campaigns to ensure smooth and effective operations. This includes building sustainable partnerships with community leaders, mobilizing local networks, and leading recruitment efforts through data-driven strategies. You will also onboard, manage, and motivate a high-performing team of community leaders and mobilizers, ensuring they are aligned with recruitment goals and targets. Additionally, you will develop innovative outreach strategies across various channels and provide continuous feedback to improve recruitment quality and conversion rates. 

The right person for this role is someone who thrives in fast-paced environments, enjoys building efficient systems, and is comfortable using data to drive decisions. You should have a knack for collaboration, experimentation, and process improvement, leveraging feedback to refine recruitment strategies.

About Educate! 

Africa has the world’s youngest and fastest-growing population. By 2035, the continent is poised to contribute more people to the global workforce each year than the rest of the world combined. 

At Educate! we're obsessed with impact. We leverage iterative learning to build highly scalable youth employment solutions aimed at unlocking the potential of the world’s youngest continent. 

Educate! prepares youth in Africa to learn, earn and thrive in today’s economy by: 

1.  introducing an employment-focused school subject into secondary, and 
2.  delivering livelihood bootcamps for out-of-school youth, with a focus on marginalized rural girls and young women.

To date, more than 390,000 youth have been meaningfully impacted across Uganda, Rwanda, and Kenya, and along the way, Educate! has become the largest youth employment and skills provider in East Africa.

Educate! is a team of over 250 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 their own organizations, and 6 current or former team members were Acumen Fund East Africa fellows. 

We have been backed by top foundations such as Imaginable Futures, Big Bang Philanthropy,  #startsmall, Generation Unlimited, CIFF and Echidna Giving. Educate! won a 2018 Klaus J. Jacobs Prize and a 2015 WISE Award, and has been highlighted by the World Bank’s S4YE's Impact Portfolio, an Al Jazeera documentary, BBC, The Brookings Institution as one of 14 case studies on scaling education, and the Gates Foundation as a Goalkeepers Accelerator. In 2022, we received a catalytic investment from philanthropist Mackenzie Scott to scale our systems change work.

Educate!'s long-term vision is to design solutions that measurably impact millions of youth across Africa each year. By 2025, we aim to scale our annual reach by 4x and measurably impact over 400,000 new youth. 

Performance Objectives 

Youth Awareness Implementation Strategy(40%)

• Have an elaborate and in-depth understanding of the youth recruitment strategic goals and priorities thus ensuring they are in a position to implement and execute the strategies in every bootcamp cycle.
• Create elaborate ways of work with the community leaders and mobilization during the youth mobilization period.
• Work closely with Program Officers and trainers to understand youth awareness pain points and call to actions that will inform better implementation of youth awareness strategies.  
• Lead in the hiring and management of the community leaders and mobilizers across the counties and ensure they are well onboarded and motivated to execute their duties.
• Lead and manage the overall and daily targets of the community leaders and mobilizers as shared by the Senior Youth Recruitment Manager.
• Have an in-depth understanding of the youth recruitment annual and quarterly budgets to ensure stakeholders are fairly compensated as per our budgeting philosophy. 
• Recommend other efficient and cost-effective awareness channels with high conversion rates leading to achievement of set KPIs within 4 weeks. 
• Document key learnings, FAQs and recommendations and share a detailed report at the end of the youth awareness exercise. 

System and Process Management(25%)

• Be a master of ALL youth recruitment systems, tools and processes.
• Lead in the onboarding and training of the awareness team on the youth recruitment systems, tools and processes.
• Evaluate youth awareness progress and recommend key strategic iterations based on the data trendlines, youth and stakeholders’ feedback.
• Interpret youth awareness data and metrics as shared by Performance Metrics and share recommendations based on daily data trendlines against set KPIs.
• Based on the data trendlines and insights, recommend key strategic iterations that will increase the awareness conversion rates.
• Collaborate with Tech and Performance Metrics in identifying scalable awareness tools through the guidance of the Senior Youth Recruitment Manager.
• Take lead on all recruitment related experiments and prototypes 

Recruitment Quality Assurance (20%)

• Onboard and implement a quality assurance strategy for the Youth Recruitment Officers.
• Regularly review and monitor the recruitment pipeline to ensure adherence to established standards.
• Conduct spot-checks and audits on recruitment activities to identify areas for improvement.
• Regularly assess recruitment activities to align with youth-friendly practices and quality standards.
• Implement feedback mechanisms to continually improve the recruitment process from a youth perspective.
• Provide clear communication and timely updates throughout the recruitment process to keep youth and stakeholders well informed.
• Conduct regular audits of youth recruitment activities to identify areas for improvement and ensure compliance with quality standards.
• Create a healthy backlog of community leaders and mobilizers in every county. 
• Implement a continuous feedback loop to refine recruitment strategies and improve the quality of youth candidates.

Channel Strategy Implementation(15%)

• Identify the most effective channels for reaching target youth demographics, such as social media platforms, educational institutions, community organizations, and community public participation events
• Plan, organize, and execute outreach activities to engage with potential youth through selected channels.
• Track the performance of different recruitment channels using key metrics such as youth eligibility, conversion rates, awareness cost and reach rate.
• Analyze data to determine the effectiveness of each channel and adjust strategies accordingly to maximize recruitment efforts.
• Ensure that recruitment messages are consistently and effectively delivered across all channels.
• Keep up-to-date with the latest trends in youth recruitment and channel strategies to ensure a better brand visibility.
• Prepare regular reports on the effectiveness of channel strategies and recruitment activities.
• Provide recommendations based on data analysis to improve the recruitment process and channel strategy implementation.

Qualifications 

• Experience working in a high-growth startup organization - Developing and implementing recruitment strategies to meet targets for Customer  awareness and acquisition, ensuring high reach rates
• Experience working with data, numbers, and reports to adjust and optimize recruitment strategies, ensuring alignment with performance goals with basic budget management experience
• Experience managing and evaluating the performance of recruitment teams, including mobilizers, community leaders, and telemarketers, to drive recruitment success.
• Strong orientation to team culture and cross-functional work.
• Minimum of a Bachelor’s degree with at least 3 and above years of experience in a similar role.
• This role is open to Kenyan nationals only and requires 40% field travels 

A good fit with our Five Cultural Tenets (see “What is Educate! About?” Below; learn more by looking at Educate!’s culture deck here. 

Location Details

• Successful candidates would need to be based in Nairobi
• We have a hybrid work philosophy! Teammates work from our offices twice per week and attend monthly team socials and culture-building events. 

Terms

• Salary will be based on market factors and commensurate with experience.
• Benefits will align with the country of hire and typically include medical and travel insurance, flexibility on work hours and hybrid work, paid leave plus one week of office closure over the December holidays, and more.

What Is Educate! About? 

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 of their careers, and we are committed to supporting our staff members on that journey.

1. 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. 
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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. We act as one team: We prioritize the organization's mission and goals over team or individual goals.
5. 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 Chief Executive Officer— 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.

Child Safeguarding: Educate! is committed to child-safe/youth-safe recruitment, selection and screening. Our recruitment and selection procedures reflect our commitment to the safety and protection of children in our programs. The successful candidate will be required to provide a satisfactory Certificate of Good Conduct as a condition of employment. We reserve the right to decline to offer employment to an individual or terminate an employment contract with an employee that may pose a risk to children and youth.