Regional Recruiting Associate at Educate!

Position Overview

Educate! has an exciting opening for a Regional Recruiting Associate 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 Associate, you’ll apply your experience sourcing and hiring top talent to shape the team that will drive growth at an award-winning social enterprise.

About Educate!

Educate! prepares youth in Africa with the skills to succeed in today’s economy. We are a non-profit social enterprise with 150 staff and 300 volunteer youth mentors. 

We tackle youth unemployment by partnering with schools and governments to reform what schools teach and how they teach it so that students in Africa have the skills to attain further education, overcome gender inequities, start businesses, get jobs and drive development in their communities. Our model is delivered through practically-trained teachers and youth mentors. Educate!’s goal is to make this practical, skills-based model part of national education systems.

Check out our COVID response page on our website to see how we’ve adapted to respond to school closures in East Africa in 2020.

In 2019, we partnered with the government to pilot in 60+ schools in Kenya, worked in 275+ secondary schools in Rwanda, and 800+ schools in Uganda (25% of the country), reaching over 46,000 students intensively and 470,000 more broadly. Two rigorous external evaluations, including a randomized controlled trial, found that towards the end of secondary school, our program participants earn nearly DOUBLE the income of their peers. A follow-up RCT found that four years later, our graduates demonstrate large and durable shifts in skills, coupled with significant improvements in education and gender equity-related outcomes. Girls achieve even greater results. Our graduates change their lives and their communities, such as Daniel who leveraged both his medical education and the transferable and business skills gained through Educate! to open a rural health clinic in his community employing two people and conducting about 350 checkups per month.

We have been backed by top foundations such as MasterCard, Big Bang Philanthropy, Mulago, Echoing Green, Ashoka, and Global Innovation Fund. Educate! won a 2018 Klaus J. Jacobs Prize (and was featured in a video), a 2015 WISE Award, and was highlighted by Bill Gates, in the World Bank’s S4YE's Impact Portfolio, an Al Jazeera documentary, Forbes 30 under 30, 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. 

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.
• Implement key recruiting processes for high-level global and new country hires 
• Liaising and maintaining relationships with recruitment channel partners including developing partnership agreements and monitoring performance of these channels.
• Ensure a positive candidate experience for all applicants by responding to enquiries from prospective applicants timely and professionally.
• Act as a point of contact and build influential candidate relationships during the selection process
• Build and follow robust screening and interview techniques to give memorable interview experience to the candidates.

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.

Implement new technologies

• Support in the implementation and management of recruiting systems 
• Influence hiring managers so they adhere to recruiting processes 98% of the time
• Leverage data to develop insights

Country-Specific Recruiting Team Support

• Support our in-country teams in Rwanda, Kenya and Uganda with recruiting needs as they arise.

Qualifications

• Excellent interpersonal and communication skills and the ability to work effectively in a multi-cultural environment
• Attention to detail, organizational and prioritization skills 
• Skills in database management and record keeping
• Ability to work in 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 confidentiality of employee and candidate information
• Background in HR Preferred
• Fits our Five Cultural Tenets (see What is Educate! About? below); Learn more by looking at Educate!’s culture deck here

Terms

• Compensation will be competitive for the social enterprise sector and commensurate with experience.
• Benefits include a generous vacation policy and medical insurance.
• This position will be based in our office in Nairobi.

Why You Will Brag About Working At Educate!

• We’ve got the impact.
• Educate! is designed for scale. We quadrupled operations in 2014, going from 54 to more than 200 schools served. We carefully measure our outcomes, and — here’s the best part — we are maintaining quality at four times the size.
• We believe in local leadership — 96% of our staff is African.
• Our model has gone nationwide in Uganda — Educate!’s model is now incorporated into the national curriculum and exams, impacting many thousands more students than we can reach directly.
• Educate is a well-oiled learning machine. We built our model by methodically testing hundreds of assumptions and we are constantly experimenting, evaluating, and improving.
• We’re honored that luminaries and leaders like Oliver Wonekha, the Ugandan Ambassador to the US, and Ann Veneman, a former Secretary of Agriculture and head of Unicef, believe in us enough to have joined our advisory board.

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.

1. We Put Youth First - The youth we serve come first. Always. In everything. That means we wake up thinking of ways we can serve youth even better and get the highest impact out of every dollar that we spend. It means Educate! doesn’t own a single vehicle, because we’d rather take the bus if it means one more student can participate. It means making every decision like the future depends on it — because if we get our way, it does.
2. We Are Always Learning - When you work at Educate!, educating yourself is part of your job too. We encourage every employee to find the best book on management; share the latest article on graphic design; bring in your favorite college mentor; or meet the researcher pushing the edge of the field. We are always thirsty for knowledge and love to share.
3. We Only Solve a Problem Once - We are allergic to band-aids so we love the person who brings the new system to solve the problem for good, even problems we haven’t recognized yet.
4. We Are Flexible - We thrive on change — we’re driving it. We are growing every day, so we have to adapt quickly to meet new challenges, and our team keeps up.
5. We Exceed Expectations - We assume we can achieve the impossible because we already have, year after year. We want our staff to create your own challenges, ask the toughest questions, and dream scary big!

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.