How Njorku Wants To Become The ‘Google’ For African Job Search

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Njorku, today released what appears to be a Google-ish search engine for African jobs with solutions for job seekers and recruiters.

The first-ever job search engine in Africa crawls the web (especially job and classified sites in Africa) to help users find jobs based on keyword searches.

What is most unique and cool about Njorku's new search algorithm is that it supports time utilities, so you can search for jobs within the past hour, past 24 hours, past week, past two weeks, past month, and even past year.



You might wonder what you need a job posted a year ago for? Well, it could help to provide insight into job trends in particular regions, especially for research purposes.

With already established deals with Human Resource companies in Cameroon, Njorku plans to also become the online recruitment platform of choice, as it plans to attract more HR companies in other regions.

Njorku had earlier tweaked its new algorithm in order to display more relevant and better search results for jobs than before. However, there is one key feature that I was expecting from this new version: Hyper-Location search.

I'd have expected that this new version would sift and display job search results based on a location such as Lagos or Nairobi or Douala. That way, users can actually choose a specific location (city or town) that they want jobs to be displayed, instead of looking through jobs that are based elsewhere in a particular country.



The new version called Njorku 2.0 also provides solutions for job seekers in Africa as it allows them to upload their CVs as well as create email and SMS alerts. On the other hand, employers and recruiters can search thousands of CV's uploaded daily by job seekers all over Africa and the rest of the world for free.

I asked Njorku's founder, Mambe Nanje if job seekers can send their CVs via its mobile version, but he told me that they are working on building mobile apps for a better experience before doing the mobile web version.

But considering that majority of job seekers may not have smartphones, my thinking is that Njorku should enable job seekers get their CVs through to employers via its mobile site first before making the service available via apps.

For employers, Njorku wants them to search for candidates that have registered or uploaded their CVs for free, which elsewhere offers a great business model. My guess is that Njorku would eventually charge employers/recruiters a fee to access this CV database.

Mambe also shared some ideas into how Njorku plans to redefine the job search business in Africa, with unique and exciting job marketing/revenue models to take on the existing competition.

Njorku has already launched local versions in Nigeria, Cameroon, Kenya, South Africa, Ghana, Uganda and Egypt and more could be in the offing.

It's amazing what the job search engine has done so far in its first year, and one can only expect it to do more in the months and years to come. Gradually, Njorku could become a household name and who knows, we might soon start using the word 'Njorku' as a verb, just like we use Google today.

So if you've been using Njorku or you're about to use it now, you might as well be 'njorking' to find jobs!

TechLoy