"Dozens of Kenyans have found jobs in the Middle East"

Business Special

Q&A Interview with Myjobseye CEO Neil Ribeiro


Q: Myjobseye is probably the most well-know web-based business in Kenya today. Please give us a brief history of your company.

myJobsEye.com was launched in August 2003. We established that there was a need in the market for employers and job seekers to quickly and easily find each other. We therefore created an easy to use web site that is a lot more than just a job board. It is a recruitment and job seeking tool! Since then we have assisted 3,500 employers in filling their vacancies. We currently have over 58,000 job seekers registered on the site.


Recently your ads have started appearing in the daily press. Why have you felt the need to go offline? Is it the fact that not enough Kenyans are online yet?

I am going to assume that you are speaking about ads that have appeared in the vacancy section of the paper. In the 30 or so months that we have been operational, we have only advertised 2 jobs in the papers. Though we have 58,000 job seekers registered on www.myjobseye.com and have a huge variety of CVs, we do not have a CV for every position. For the 2 positions that were advertised, the employers were looking for something very specific that we did not have on our site. For the both jobs, we were not able to find a person who matched all requirements from the paper either.


What do you consider to be the biggest change that has taken place in the jobs/recruitment industry in Kenya over the last few years that you have been in it?

The biggest change has been myJobsEye.com! We have been able to make the industry a lot more transparent, and have significantly reduced the time it takes to fill jobs. A gentleman who was unemployed for 7 years came to myjobseye.com and found a job with in a couple of months. We have brought back a handful of Kenyans living in the US, UK and Australia back to Kenya. Through myJobsEye.com, dozens of Kenyans have found jobs in the Middle East.


What has been your biggest success as a management team?

Our biggest success has been to be able to effectively build a business in an industry that was once filled with con men using a medium that was not very common. We have done this by consistently providing a service that meets, if not exceeds, every employer and job seekers expectations.


What has been your greatest challenge as a management team and how have you dealt with it?

There have been 2 great challenges. The lack of good, and easily accessible internet connectivity, and a belief by most Kenyans that the Internet does not go beyond yahoo mail and chat. Soon after we launched myjobseye.com, we actively campaigned for a more liberal telecommunications market. We have since seen the Telkom / Jambonet monopoly die. Every day we conduct a training session called "Cybermania" in one cyber café in Nairobi. During a Cybermania, we train job seekers on how upload a good CV on myJobsEye.com and how to apply for jobs via the site. These sessions are free to jobseekers.

(Read Part II of this interview.)