Clemens Weitz - Afrikan Heroes

ROAM Africa announces remote work policy for employees due to COVID-19

March 24, 2020

In response to the plea by Africa’s leadership that organisations help to aid efforts being made to reduce the infectious rate of the Covid-19 Virus, ROAM Africa Group formerly known as Ringier One Africa Media, which operates in eight Sub-Saharan African countries has decided to shut down its physical offices across the continent. ROAM which is one of the continents leading digital classifieds group in Sub-Saharan Africa, unified by its mission to connect Africans to opportunities and be Africa’s most user-centric marketplace company said it wants to lead the charge. The company announced today that its 400 staff in Senegal, Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Ethiopia and South Africa are to work remotely as part of efforts to curb the spread of the Covid-19 across the continent. The Company noted that it is requiring all employees to work remotely as part of efforts to protect its workforce from the COVID-19 virus.

In February, ROAM Africa increased travel restrictions and implemented a self-quarantine policy for its staff traveling to countries with high numbers of COVID-19 cases. As COVID-19 continues to spread across the continent, ROAM Africa moved to mandate the new remote work policy. Starting this week, 400 staff in Senegal, Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Ethiopia and South Africa are working remotely.

The Africa CEO of ROAM Clemens Weitz said that this decision was arrived at after careful examination of the developments surrounding the spread of the virus across Africa adding that “Covid-19 pandemic is a global challenge, but African countries face particular headwinds from the virus given their fragile economies and underdeveloped health care systems. Its impact in the region could be severe. In these unprecedented times, we’re committed to the safety of our staff. Our employees’ well-being and health are critical to our ability to continue our important work of connecting people to opportunity.”

ROAM Africa’s Head of Talent, Heather O’Shea who is leading the shift to remote operations said that “the most important thing right now is the safety and well-being of our staff members – and we have been swift to move to a remote working policy. But working from home can be challenging, so this is only the start: the challenge is to equip our people and teams with the right mindset and tools to work effectively from home. This comes with investments that we are willing to make.”.

Kelechi Deca

Kelechi Deca has over two decades of media experience, he has traveled to over 77 countries reporting on multilateral development institutions, international business, trade, travels, culture, and diplomacy. He is also a petrol head with in-depth knowledge of automobiles and the auto industry

New Collaboration to Transform Employment Process Across Africa

January 23, 2020

A new collaboration between ROAM Africa and Interview Mocha aimed at significantly transforming the way African organizations recruit talent across the continent has been birthed. This was cemented through a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between ROAM Africa and Interview Mocha. ROAM Africa which is a member of Ringier One Africa Media operates the leading career portals across East and West Africa and are owners of Jobberman.com and Brightermonday.com. Interview Mocha on the other hands, provides candidate assessment software with the most comprehensive skill range. It is hoped that this collaboration will provide an affordable and scalable way to empower employers to identify the top talent, by integrating candidate assessments into the hiring and application flow.

Finding the right talent to execute strategies is the largest internal challenge of African CEOs, according to a 2019 survey by consulting company Deloitte. Employers hiring are facing an increasingly larger number of applications, with up to thousands of applications per job and an inability to identify the best candidates at scale. Together with ROAM Africa’s BestMatch technology, the solution creates unparalleled opportunities to recruit at scale and ensure quality.

The new solution will be launched in the upcoming weeks and will be transformative across multiple dimensions, as it brings multiple elements together: deep insights through customized assessments, the mass scale of the leading job boards, as well as product affordability to ensure wide adoption.

Clemens Weitz, ROAM CEO states that “we believe that Africa is the future, and that talent is equally distributed across the world. Today we see largely broken recruitment markets, with most organizations hiring rarely the best available talent. We are pioneering a solution that will change this. We match the best talent into organizations and create happier employees, more productive teams and markets. Our new offering in partnership with Interview Mocha is cutting edge and will transform how employers select candidates.”

ROAM Jobs which is part of the ROAM Africa Group is the leading digital classifieds group in Sub-Saharan Africa. Unified by its mission to connect Africans to opportunities and be Africa’s most user-centric marketplace company, it operates across eight Sub-Saharan countries. ROAM Jobs operates in Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Nigeria and Ghana, with a multi-brand strategy, including Jobberman in West Africa and BrighterMonday in East Africa.

Interview Mocha on the other hand is the world’s largest API based skill assessment platform. We leverage our product and services to align the best resources with employers. We aim to contribute to the ever-changing skill matrix with our in-depth market research, battery of global domain experts, and technology to prepare the world’s largest and latest, quality skills assessment repository.

The CEO of Mocha Amit Mishra stated that his organization believes in “the vision ROAM has for the African job market. We see a huge void in the best practices for recruiting; hence having a leak-proof recruitment environment adds immense value to the recruitment process. By integrating with ROAM’s existing solution we are certain to connect the best employees with employers.”

This is part of ROAM Africa’s wider matching and insights strategy. ROAM also aims at leveraging the data to create insights for jobseekers around their strengths and weaknesses, as well as with partner organizations to improve policy decision making and address wider employment and education issues.

Kelechi Deca