CareerLife Nigeria holds session for job seekers

To ensure that qualified graduates get their place in the job market with the increasing rate of competitiveness, CareerLife Nigeria recently held its pilot edition of Employability Fitness Programme (EFP) to help jobseekers overcome interview phobia.

This was achieved by putting them in an interview with Human Resource Professionals and Subject Matter Experts so that the feedback they would get would be personalised to their unique need and deficiency.

According to the founder, CareerLife Nigeria, Yewande Jinadu, the initiative was conceived out of the passion to help solve the issue of unemployability among graduates. The level of unemployment has caused a lot of graduates to not only despise interviews but also become fearful which makes them fail and remain unemployed.

The National Bureau of Statistics, in its 2018 report, shows that the third quarter unemployment rate was 23.1 per cent, the underemployment rate was 20.1 per cent, while the combined unemployment and underemployment rate was 43.3 per cent.

Jinadu noted that she also struggled with interviews and dreaded it so much until she decided to pursue Talent Acquisition as a career path and learnt how it felt to be at the other side of the table.

The effect of the program is to make the participants more confident of themselves and also open their eyes to where they have gotten it all wrong.

While commenting on what employers are looking out for in a prospective employee, Jinuade said that value is one of the most important things they are searching for.

“Not only experienced people have value to give, Fresh graduates too offer value through transferable skills gained from school or internships. These should be communicated to prospective employers.”

Also speaking at the event, Partner at The Workplace Centre, Abiola Omotayo-Benson, while giving insight to overcoming interview phobia by relating to her personal story, said that if you are self-aware and you know the reasons why they should hire you, you would also do better.

“Overcoming phobia has a lot to do with you. Understand yourself, a lot of people are not self-aware. Understand your shortcoming and work on it. Ask sensible questions, volunteer also, these are ways to build your self-confidence.”Some participants got personalised feedback on areas of improvement and free Curriculum Vitae and LinkedIn profile review. The programme still continues with a three months post-coaching exercise.