Written by: Brian Herbert
Since today is Labor Day, a day off for “working citizens”, here in the States, I thought I would highlight the Ethopian based African startup Zebra Jobs. This is a website that’s comparable to CareerBuilder.com or Yahoo! HotJobs.
Not only is Zebra a job board, but it also offers registered users a wide range of services from education and internship opportunities as well as pointers on job search and building skills. For employers, they can post their listings for free, as Zebra is supported through sponsorship and ad revenue with Google AdWords.
When signing up and entering my contact information, I noticed the “State/Province” dropdown didn’t work. Since this is a required field, I had to figure out how to make this work so I continued to fill out the form and it disappeared after selecting my country. Continuing with this form, I was told I had to fill in all the required fields. I suspect something went wrong with the AJAX lookup of valid states. I may be being picky but this should come after the country dropdown for usability sake or this should not rely on AJAX as most Africans are using very slow and unreliable Internet access.
To Zebra’s credit, even though I had the issue with the dropdown menu, the rest of the sign up process was a breeze. It didn’t require too much information, which a lot of job posting sites generally do. I was quickly able to sign up and start browsing positions and found a number of jobs related to technology.
Even though I found a few positions in my field, at the time of this writing, I only see 306 jobs posted for all of Africa. This is understandable given the current adoption of technology in Africa but could be much better, even though most people conduct their job searchs via word of mouth or through traditional media like the newspaper. As Africa becomes more technologically literate, more people will move their search online which will make this tool much more valuable.
It will be interesting to see how well this site adapts to the market as competetors will surely enter as more users come online. This is a great start and I’d love to see more sites like it.
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