Graduating from university usually comes with hopes of securing meaningful employment and building one’s future. This is especially after all the hassle and sacrifices that one has to make through before completing a degree. Unfortunately, this is hardly the case in Kenya where the unemployment rate currently stands at 39.1 %. This means that about 4 in 10 Kenyans are out of a job. The job search, however, is not limited to recent graduates but also includes those who have resigned from their previous engagements and looking for new jobs.
This was the case with Rose Munuhe who after resigning her previous job found it very difficult to find a new one. She noticed a gap in the recruitment process of most companies as a good number of job ads don’t get posted in the classifieds section of the newspaper. She then got the idea of starting the hashtag, #IkoKaziKe. The jobs were there, but their visibility was limited to those individuals who followed these companies online or if one happened to be in a WhatsApp group where someone shared the ad.
Rose Munuhe, shares her story below on how it all started;
“#IkoKaziKE was started because I realized we have a gap in recruitment. There are many jobs available but unfortunately, people are not aware of them. Take the case of a job ad that i have received via WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram or twitter. The visibility of this job ad is limited to me. I can either choose to share the same with close friends and family who come to mind or simply ignore. But what if i could share the jobs that i come across to EVERYONE? What if I could advertise a job and get real-time results? The feedback on Twitter speaks volumes of the success of the using the hashtag. #IkoKaziKe is engaged on an almost daily basis. What is shared varies from job listings, testimonials of those who have landed interviews and gotten hired to individuals looking for work.”
According to Munuhe, a lot more still needs to be done by the government to help curb the rate of unemployment. “In all honesty I do not feel our government does enough when it comes to job creation yet in reality we have thousands of fresh graduates each year. We have companies shutting down and retrenching every year and nobody seems to realize or care that it simply means more unemployed people. It’s a difficult time to get a job. We also have a good number of young people who cannot access funds to finance their businesses. We have misuse of funds by counties. We have so many things going wrong and there is some sort of reluctance to make things better.”
For Munuhe, starting #IkoKaziKe was all about ‘sending the elevator’ back down. This was with the view of helping her counterparts who were faced with the same frustration of aggressively looking for jobs but ending up with nothing. Because a good number of Kenyans are online, the hashtag is definitely making a difference and helping match those with skills with available jobs.
