In an office located in what was likely someone’s two-story home, a growing number of mostly male young professionals work every day. This is ARMA Advertising’s new space. They have been at this office less than a month but have occupied every space available with the necessities for a company like this – desks, chairs, computers. The downstairs area, which would have typically been a living room, is home to multiple tables that can seat at least a dozen programmers that will remain glued to their screens for hours at a time. The windows are scribbled on with marker, even the tables can be written on and erased immediately, for taking notes or doodling during meetings.
ARMA Advertising has been the leading organization specializing in motion graphics and animations in Addis Ababa since its establishment in 2015. The people behind ARMA Advertising have never limited their scope to the growing world of advertising. Their sights have often been set to the future, following patterns and predicting what’s to come. They dip their hands in multiple sectors, waiting to see how it pans out. Fetena is their education app designed to support high school students excel in national standardized exams. Supplier Ethiopia is the lesser known platform that connects businesses and individuals with product and service suppliers. Freelance Ethiopia is another product they launched that has been growing in popularity for years now.
Freelance Ethiopia began operation in 2018 after co-founders Semegn Tadesse, Michael Berhanu, and Eyoeal Kefyalew needed to hire a few people for freelance work. The telegram channel kept attracting an increasing number of people and companies and individuals looking for someone to hire found this platform easy to use.
“Many people don’t know how to click the apply or send button on their cellphones let alone write CVs,” says Michael, explaining how multiple trials and errors had led them to simplify steps to apply for a job on Freelance Ethiopia. These problems also encouraged the team to develop a CV generator people can use.
Freelance Ethiopia has over 108,000 subscribers, more than half of whom keep the channel unmuted. A recent survey they conducted using their homegrown research tool Masero Insights found that although the channel was first created to a growing gig market economy and catered to freelance, contractual, or part-time workers, 67% of the people on the channel are searching for permanent employment. Most available jobs are in sales, IT, tutoring, and the creative sector. Universities, international NGOs, largest firms in the country all advertise jobs on Freelance Ethiopia and the channel has grown a lot since it began operations. So why is it so popular?
“Some organizations fear saying they posted on Freelance so they use aliases. We get feedback from employees so we know who’s hiring them. I think they don’t know what Freelance Ethiopia is; so, they’re not sure if they should be associated with it or not.”
HR companies connecting employees with jobs work through websites and in-person meetings, employers pay annual subscription fees to use their services and often focus on high-level corporate jobs. Freelance Ethiopia has been able to penetrate a formerly unregarded user base by targeting entry and mid level jobs using highly accessible technology. Telegram is the most used mobile app in the country and one can post a job opening, interview, and hire them in just 48 hours. The Freelance Ethiopia app exists but its resources have been focused on developing the telegram channel. “We realized tech has to be tailored to Ethiopia. That’s why telegram is so popular. Not everyone is tech-savvy and this is easy to use,” explains Eyoeal. Offering this service for free of course contributes to its growing client base.
The ARMA team has been running this channel for free since its launch and making improvements have been expensive, they say. “We aren’t generating any money. We can see multiple HR organizations using our platform. There are new companies hiring their entire staff from the ground up through us. But creating new features, debugging, customer service, and the time it takes are all costly.” The team is determined to keep the current features free while adding monetizable features like screening applicants, headhunting, generating job descriptions, and creating contracts through AI they plan on developing.
“Small and Medium Enterprises account for 70% of employment nationwide but they’re underrepresented and undervalued. We’re trying to cater to them. We don’t discriminate corporate but their HR departments should be capable of taking care of their needs. Our product design is focused on SMEs. We want to become the largest HR platform for SMEs all over Ethiopia.” explains Semegn.
The Job Creation Commission says the national unemployment rate is 4.5% but puts unemployment in Addis Ababa alone around 24% as of 2013. In light of great shifts in the economic and political landscape in the country, as well as the lack of baseline information on population statistics, this data should be taken with a grain of salt. Data from 2018 puts unemployment in urban areas at 18%. According to Freelance Ethiopia’s research, two-third of their employees have university degrees and 67% are currently unemployed. 50% of employees do not work in fields they studied in university, the majority of which studied engineering.
“The education system is already problematic; so, we can’t expect the job market to solve problems,” they say. “You don’t push people to find jobs because you’re pushing them into nothing. Unemployment and underemployment will be the biggest threat we’ll be facing in the next ten years. We’re not creating value in the economy, if we’re selling air,” adds Semegn.
Technology is evolving exponentially and the jobs we create and train for have to grow along with that. They add that developing a culture of internships in high school and university could help young people understand the world of work and clarify what they’d like to do in the future. Freelance Ethiopia’s next step involves taking on the responsibility of contributing 10-15% of the national goal to curb the unemployment rate. They are planning on launching a system that relies on SMS and call centers to connect job seekers to employment opportunities – all accessible offline and with no in-person contact.
“We can do things from the ground up and guide policy instead of thinking of one large plan. If our solution works out, we’re planning on replicating this throughout Africa.”
