TechMoran talks to Nigeria’s Insidify co-founders. We had already covered them here but we wanted them to tell it all to the world minus us interrupting.
Insidify is a blend of two words – inside and identify. With the tagline “get inside, identify”. We aggregate jobs; so, get inside our huge database of jobs and identify your fit. We connect jobs with people; so, get inside your network and identify people that connect you to jobs, we also help employers get inside and identify their best hire from both passives and active professionals.
Insidify.com empowers its users to engage their social and professional connections better in identifying job and career opportunities. Unlike on other platforms where jobseekers just post their CVs and ‘hope’ to get hired, Insidify provides a platform where jobseekers, employers and other professionals can actually connect with one another and make meaningful and productive interactions that lead to recruiting and other career-related decisions.
Who are the founders?
Deji ‘Lana and Emmanuel Okeleji
What inspired them?
The sickening unemployment situation in Africa. Youth unemployment across the continent is nearing 40% and even over 50% in some places. This unfortunately is happening at the same time with a continental youth bulge, which should normally be yielding a positive demographic dividend. The average age in Africa now is 18 and there will be 74 million new people added to the ‘working-age’ over the next 7 years. It means that for us to keep unemployment at its present dismally high rate, we need to create at least 74million new jobs. Huge work for everybody; Governments, Schools, Entrepreneurs, everybody.
Yes, we urgently need to create new jobs across the continent. But even with the jobs that exist now, there is the problem of mismatch, with job seekers finding it difficult to identify fitting jobs and employers finding it hard to find the right hire. What Insidify.com is doing is to bring the most advanced technologies to this table, to make the process of finding jobs and recruiting as efficient as it can probably be. In addition, by creating a platform for professional interaction, we are unlocking the potentials of human collaboration and generating huge, useful data.
Tell us more about yourself?
A young African Entrepreneur, blessed with a knack for innovation and business strategy and an unrelenting love for Africa. I ironically studied Medicine & Surgery and did practice Clinical Medicine for some years, but I have always been an Entrepreneur, from early childhood. Had a stint working at Goldman Sachs and I have worked and still work on a decent number of businesses in Nigeria. Okay, I love photography, poetry, classical music, jazz and soul music.
Why launch a job site when there are so many already?
There are truly several African job sites already, but none with our unique philosophy and innovative set of services. We identified a number of core problems that are not being solved at all by the existing jobs sites. Insidify.com is not just a jobsite, but also a professional platform where individuals improve and put their network to good use.
Insidify specifically has a unique value proposition for each of these groups:
Professionals and Job seekers:
Insidify.com aggregates job openings from ALL major Nigerian job sites, company career pages, newspapers and classifieds, so that you can search for all Nigerian jobs from one place!
The site is also a professional networking platform that helps job seekers find people on their Facebook, LinkedIn and email contacts who work in any of the companies that advertise the vacancies aggregated on the search engine. Of course this also has potentials for sales and marketing and other forms of business relationships and collaborations.
Employers and Companies.
Insidify offers a platform which enables employers to cone down talent search to the single perfect hire, by using Insidify’s intelligent talent search technology. They also get to find far more information about the people they are interested in than an average CV can give. They get their company profiles hosted on the website where they can engage a growing pool of professionals, promote their brands, build a huge following and culture potential hires. Additionally, employers can also post jobs for free! We launched the Employer Platform on private beta already, but will go live soon.
What is your business model?
At this stage everything we do is free. Basic services will always be free. Users will only have to pay for a number of value added services in the near future.
What are your challenges?
The usual challenges that face start-ups the world over. Finding skill, getting mind share from all classes of customers e.t.c Typically for a Nigerian start-up; most of what you have heard people say before; power, logistics, infrastructure, regulation; the whole works! But again, that is life. Opportunity lies in the jaws of challenges, so it’s all part of the job.
Do you have any affiliations or partnerships?
A number of alliances are in the works.
How do you expect to beat your local competition or how unique are you from the competition?
First, we have our eyes on the ball. In this case our customers, so we have set out to solve the customers’ problems; the obvious problems and even those the customers are yet to identify. We try to be a customer-centric innovation company rather than a competition-centric one. Ultimately it is the customers that determine who wins.
Insidify.com approaches the value chain from a totally different direction. Insidify.com’s unique value propositions are “Blue Ocean”. We combine aggregation with networking in a wayno one today does across Africa and actually, probably globally.
Where do you expect your business to be in five years?
The brief we have given ourselves at Insidify.com is to continue to innovate. In five years, we will still be at the cutting edge, giving the best value to our customers. By God’s grace, we’ll be doing what we do across Africa and other emerging markets by then.
Any plans to expand out of your country?
Yes.
Have you received any funding yet?
Yes. Seed funding from a number of sweet Angels.
How is the start-up environment in your city?
It is quite a challenging playground here, but show me where it isn’t? I started my first Tech Company in 2007. In those 7 years a whole lot has changed. The field is full of players now (Entrepreneurs, Investors, Labour) and more are coming in by the day which is very exciting for the whole eco system. The trend is certainly upwards.
One word to guys/ girls who want to start tech businesses?
Go!
