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In this interview, Mark Igbinedion, Founder and Sales Director of Productive People Limited, spoke with Jide Akintunde, Managing Editor, Financial Nigeria Magazine, on the state of Nigeria's HR sector as the recruitment company marks one year of operations.

Jide Akintunde (JA): Congratulations on attaining the first anniversary of your operation. What has been the experience of Productive People in the HR space in the past  year?

Mark Igbinedion (MI): Thank you very much Jide. Well, it has been more than interesting. Working within the HR space anywhere in the world is tricky; but it is particularly difficult in Nigeria.
    
However, for us, we had a specific goal of how we wanted to do things and the type of services we would strive to offer. The first few months of this year were used to prepare the team for the work we need to do to achieve our goal. The preparation and onboarding process took a little longer than initially expected, but it has been worth the time.
    
As a team, we really do enjoy what we do and this makes everything a lot easier. We all know the economy is going through a difficult patch right now. Because of this, we are faced with an uphill battle at times. But as a company, we focus a lot on quality. We know that this attribute will always help us stand out from the crowd. We have also gone against the grain in terms of our internal operations to be innovative and to help us work more efficiently.
    
A lot of Nigerians seem to ignore any sort of service-standard control system. But we have found people to be very appreciative of what we do by the fact that Productive People offers an international service with a local twist. We have been recognised to have a lot of potential and immediate opportunities within Nigeria in just our first year of operation.

JA: The recruitment space – and maybe wider HR – has not been spared the digital disruption that we are seeing in various industries. HR is not only internationalized, it is globalized through digitalization of executive search, training, etc. Is this an opportunity or a challenge to Productive People?
 
MI: I am glad that you have asked me this question. Yes, HR is very digitalized in this day and age. This allows companies around the world to satisfy a client's need from virtually any location. For example, when I worked in London, I had clients in France, Brussels and Germany. However, permit me to tell you pretty much the same thing I say to a lot of people, which is that Productive People is very much a people-to-people company. This means we are all about building personal relationships with both our clients and candidates.  

We are not a job board or a heavily online-focused company meeting the human resource needs of our clients from our online platform. We believe HR in Nigeria cannot work like that. There are too many mitigating factors, which you are aware of. How can you sell a candidate to a business that you have never had any interactions with? How can you suggest a training course to a client when you have not spent time understanding their business?

Digitalization is benefitting so many HR companies worldwide, especially given the growth of the global outsourcing industry. However, because of the structure of many Nigerian businesses, the local HR industry still needs a much more personal touch. Nevertheless, we have the expertise to meet the needs of global companies operating in Nigeria.  

JA: Headhunting becomes especially difficult in Nigeria, in light of the fallen standard of education and how that rubs off on industry values. What solution would you like to prescribe against this drift?

MI: My answer here is simple. What we need is training. Our motto is: Teach, Encourage, Work for a specific reason. Before an employer decides to label an employee as incompetent, simply ask yourselves the following questions: Have you taught the employee with regard to what he or she needs to do? Have you encouraged them? Have you motivated them to work?

Institutions in both the private and public sectors need to start spending a lot more time and money on the training and development of their staff. When we started Productive People we hired young people with very little comprehensive work experience. We spent over six months nurturing, encouraging and training them before they started to realise their potential. Everybody is different and some people take more time to blossom.

Too many employers write people off because they expect their employees to have had all the skills. But the truth is everybody is a work-in-progress. We have some extremely talented people in Nigeria that only require the right nurturing to become future market leaders in their chosen fields.

JA: What are the core values of Productive People, which should make your agency the choice for discerning employers?

MI: Most companies will list the same core values as we have, but those values would mean different things to different companies. What truly sets us apart from the rest is the strength and unity of our team. There are not many environments in Nigeria where you will find a more dedicated and motivated team of individuals who are determined to succeed.

We treat our clients and candidates exactly the same way. We consider both our clients and candidates as very valuable assets to our business. Our mission statement is: “To help people achieve more with less.” Our vision statement is: “To be the top human capital development consultancy in Sub-Saharan Africa by 2020.”  

The whole team has fully bought into these statements and they will stop at nothing to help the company achieve these goals. The issues employers are facing in Nigeria are not so complicated. So the solutions we provide will never be complicated either.

JA: What are the mistakes that job candidates often make which must be corrected to enhance their chances of being selected for those well sought-after jobs?

MI: I would say there are a number of things that we feel candidates are getting wrong when looking for that key job. First of all, we look at their first presentation, which is their CV. The correct layout of a CV is not common knowledge but people should understand that the easier it is for a prospective employer to actually understand your CV, the more likely it is for you to get a positive outcome.

Next would be the presentation of their knowledge and skills during the interview, which go hand-in-hand with the confidence of the candidate. If you have been working in a particular role for 5-10 years, you should be very confident about what you do. We have, however, found that this is not always the case. Interviewing is not an easy exercise, I can tell you that. We encourage people to spend more time preparing for job interviews. They need to exude confidence when they are meeting with their prospective employers.

Lastly, I would want to have a quick mention of attitude. Employers like to hire people who have not only the right skills but, more importantly, the right attitude to work. We have met too many talented candidates who fall at the final hurdle due to poor attitudinal traits. It can be as little as turning up late for an interview and not calling beforehand to say they might be late. This can easily be avoided; to be fair, it should not happen.

JA: One of the reasons anyone would try to weather the Nigerian economic headwinds is the hope that things will get better with time. What is your outlook of recruitment in Nigeria and more broadly the economy?

MI: There is so much opportunity within the HR space in Nigeria as well as Nigeria's economy as a whole that it is a big surprise to me we are still in a recession. We, like most people, understand that one of the first sectors to suffer during an economic downturn is the recruitment sector. Companies would generally first look at the reduction of their headcount; then some companies would scrap any sort of training budget. This is always unfortunate because companies do need their staff to be much more productive during tough times.

A silver lining for high-skilled people is the rising opportunities for critical roles in some institutions. A lot of companies are having to reduce their expatriate headcount for the obvious foreign exchange shortage, which has now created more opportunities for local candidates to fill these positions. This can be seen as an opportunity that will keep boosting the recruitment sector over the next year.

At Productive People, we are always very optimistic. Nigeria's economy has the strong fundamentals to rise up from this current challenges.

The recruitment sector will naturally grow as the economy diversifies. A dynamic and virile recruitment sector is good for building a strong and efficient Nigerian economy moving forward. We are looking forward to more opportunities in the next few years.