What Job Seekers Must Do Before Applying For Jobs in Nigeria

By Mutiu Iyanda

We do not need to hire a microscope from the United States of America or the United Kingdom to know that the unemployment rate has been alarming in the last five years. We equally do not need to hire business experts from other countries before realising that businesses are struggling to survive and attract the right candidates for various positions due to the dwindling education standard and absence of complete skills set needed for different roles and tasks.

But job seekers would have to blame themselves if they continue finding it difficult to get their desired jobs as businesses innovate and increase their capabilities towards improved solutions delivery and mitigating the micro and macro challenges from economic and political funnels.

It is annoying that despite the staggering unemployment rate in the previous years and possible increase by 2020, Nigerian job seekers are failing to realise that their personal features and values must align with the businesses’ purposes and values. Instead of harmonizing their resources towards understanding companies and curriculum vitae development, they appropriated the resources dominantly for comprehending jobs and recruitment processes in Q1 and Q2, 2019, analysis reveals.

For instance, in Q1 2019, NNPC, Nigeria Police, Dangote, Nigeria Customs Service, Nigeria Prison Service, NAFDAC, FRSC, Nigeria Immigration and Flour Mill were the main establishments they sought knowledge about, basically to understand the nature of vacancies and requirements. This also applies to Q2 2019, when NNPC, WAEC, Nigeria Customs Service, Nigeria Prison Service, Rivers State University of Science and Technology, Ikeja Electricity Distribution Company and Delta State’s Teachers Recruitment were the most searched organisations for possible job placements.

Source: Google Trends, Infoprations Analysis, 2019

Navigate the Market: The Place of PPPT Framework

To navigate the market and survive the storms occasioned by the lack of small and large scale businesses to absorb a significant number of the graduates, the sellers (graduates) need to “SWOTise” [strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats] themselves along with PPPT framework. PPPT entails process, product, people and technology. At process, fresh graduates and job seekers need to devise means through which the needed jobs could be got. The first stage within the process is to be a qualified person.

By virtue of being a University or other higher institution graduates, this stage is accomplished. Beyond this, job seekers must be able to develop appropriate and valuable curriculum vitae that will attract buyers (in this case, HR person acting for the business owners or the owners themselves). Within the process, people must assist job seekers. They could be teachers, mentors, friends and colleagues. The assistance must have been got while in school and during the course of developing disruptive CV.

Having disruptive CV is a matter of doing a SWOT analysis before writing and applying for a job. Doing a SWOT analysis will assist the job seekers in understanding how they fit with the buyers’ business environment because the environment is being competitive every day. The tool –SWOT has been used and still being applied by businesses to pinpoint strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats to their process, product, people and technologies. This explains why SWOT is important in CV writing.

When businesses want to understand their environment, they identify specific internal prowess, capabilities and competencies with the intent of capitalizing on them while executing or delivering promised values to the clients. Efforts are made by the employees at corporate, business and functional levels to mitigate weaknesses and threats to the business profitability and sustainability. The end result of SWOTIZING by any business is to know how to improve the PPPT. When it is obvious that new hands (employees) need to be added to enhance, process, product and technology, human resources department swings into action by calling for application from prospective employees.

Such employees must also adopt the tool while writing their tailored job vacancy requirements as explained earlier.  Job seekers should see themselves as products expected to add value to the buyers’ process, product and technologies being threatened by external forces capable of reducing profits and ending the business’ life. Job seekers’ strengths and opportunities must align with the buyers’ SO as explained in job description, roles or responsibilities, skills and competencies.

It’s important because knowing the negatives and positives remain appropriate means of making the right decisions. When the negatives outweigh the positives for a particular job, the ideal is not to apply for such job. From experience, the CV of such person would not be attended to because the negatives must have established that the person failed to meet the job description, job roles or functions, skills and competency tests of the buyer (employer), which further established that the candidate would not be a perfect person to solve the identified weaknesses and threats.

Weighing and Making Smart Decision

Source: Infoprations Analysis, 2019

In our model, job seekers must be sincere while evaluating their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats in line with the buyers’ own. The strengths and opportunities could be recorded using +5 or +10. The same approach applies to weaknesses and threats, but it must be in negative form.

The score for each strength, weakness, opportunity and threat must be added to have cumulative score that point out the direction of the decision that should be taken. SO belongs to positive polarity while WT belongs to negative polarity, according to our analysis. With this, it is easier for the job seekers to decide whether to apply for a job or not.