HaHuJobs to Set Physical Foot in Addis Ababa 

HaHuJobs, a data-driven job matching and labor market information platform in Ethiopia, is setting up employment centers in Addis Ababa.

With the first one to be opened in November 2022 in Megenagna, the centers serve as a foothold for the digital platform serving both employers and job seekers.

Designed primarily to bring low and medium-skilled job seekers without smartphones, internet access, or digital know-how into the labor market, the centers provide career profiling and job matching services.

Established in 2018 by Kaleab Mezgebu, Eskinder Mamo, and Micheal Sahlu under Minab IT Solutions Plc, HahuJobs is a startup working on automating traditional recruitment processes.

HaHuJobs aims to capture structured data on the Ethiopian skilled and unskilled labor market by digitally connecting thousands of job seekers in major Ethiopian cities.

The cloud-based product is a collection of microservices that offer functionalities that revolve around data-driven job matching, student tracking, capacity building, and assessment of job seekers.

Through its new centers, Hahu will enable job seekers to have a standardized career profile, which is synonymous with a traditional CV.

A career profile has a predefined structure with base data, such as education background with select and set institutes, composed of a career summary and experience from occupational standard skill sets, and qualifications based on the Ethiopian context.

Enterprise workers’ demand and supply management is one of the primary services given at the centers. This model is not new to HaHu as it serves all the active industrial parks under the Ethiopian Investment Commission contracted by the Bridges Program in Ethiopia as well as the companies operating in them since mid-2018. HaHu has ten employment centers within the industrial parks in various regions of Ethiopia, of which six are active.

HaHu allows companies in industrial parks to submit white-collar vacancies and labor demands with a fully automated digital recruitment process. Similarly, enterprises in Addis Ababa looking for labor forces can utilize the center to reach maximum impact by combining it with the features of Hahu’s cloud service.

Data collection and reporting are also done at the center, allowing stakeholders to track project key performance indicators in real time. The centers, which will serve both graduates and non-graduates, will also collect biometric identification data such as fingerprints for accurate records and profile identification.

“There is a lack of data insight in the Ethiopian labor market; things are done through rounding research-based estimations. There is no accurate operation-based data on Ethiopia’s labor market trend,” Kaleab, CEO and co-founder of HaHu, told Shega.

When HaHu assessed the Ethiopian labor market, they found that employment agencies’ significant revenue is limited to advertising vacancies and not through matchmaking.

“To advertise a job vacancy, a recruiter has to pay from 3,000 to 4,000 birr, and that’s the only service they get,” said Kaleab.

“Many enterprises have a similar need, which is standardization. Their vacancies are drawn out from existing templates and depend on how good the human resources team is at accurately describing the post, “says Kaleab.

HaHu takes in vacancy ads and gives them proper data structure, aligning them with internationally accredited standardized vacancy classification.

HaHu offers scripted template vacancies from its compiled data of more than 70,000 vaccines. Enterprises can select standardized job description templates composed of various openings in HaHu’s vacancy database.

On the job seeker side, HaHu automatically generates a resume profile for job seekers. This structured job seeker data contrasted with the standardized vacancy data generates a job matching index value.

In addition, the Hahu platform offers robust reporting dashboards through indexed data that uses visualizations for summarized representation of ground operations. Hahu also provides periodic monthly insight reports.

HaHu will also test and conduct interviews with job seekers in employment centers for enterprises that outsource human resource tasks.

Enterprises that remotely sign up can post vacancies, receive applicants digitally, and be offered standardized vacancy templates from HaHu’s database.

Job seekers don’t pay anything to get the service, while enterprises pay in two payment schemes. The first is for automated recruitment, a service provided on a monthly subscription basis, and its price ranges from 3000 to 15,000 birr depending on the company’s scale and the services it subscribes to use.

In the second model, employers access the pool of job seekers’ data compiled for relevance by HaHu without going through vacancy advertisements or general recruitment process.

HaHu has only been providing services through telegram and web-based MVP (minimum viable product) so far. HaHu plans to release a mobile application and web platform along with the employment center in the coming months.

Since 2018, HaHu has facilitated 110,431 industrial park labor demands and has aggregated 72,750 vacancies.