Senior Talent Acquisition Leadership Role, Corporate Functions

The client

Our client is a licensed mobile money and financial services company operating across roughly a dozen markets in West, Central and East Africa. It employs several thousand people and is still growing quickly, with particular investment going into its people, finance and operations functions.

The talent acquisition team is organised by functional specialism rather than by country. Each recruiter owns a function and hires it in every market the company operates in. Compensation is set by transparent formula at the top of the local market.

We will share the company's name once we have spoken.

The mandate

You will build and lead the team responsible for hiring across the corporate functions that keep a licensed financial institution safe, funded and well run: People, Legal, Risk, Fraud, Compliance, Finance and Business Development, in every market.

These are low-volume, high-consequence hires. One wrong compliance officer or country finance lead costs far more than a slow quarter. The role hires for judgment.

You report to the Global Head of Talent and inherit three experienced, senior recruiters, with headcount growing behind you. You are the direct counterpart to the heads of each function on org design, levelling, compensation calibration and hiring plans, and you run the most senior and most sensitive searches personally.

What you will own

• End-to-end recruiting delivery across all corporate functions, in every market the company operates in.
• Leading, coaching and growing a team of senior recruiters: setting expectations, running weekly pipeline reviews, raising the sourcing bar.
• The most senior and most confidential searches, run by you, including some for roles that are still filled.
• Durable talent maps for the profiles that are always scarce: qualified accountants, in-house counsel, and compliance officers across francophone and anglophone markets and the diaspora.
• Turning function heads' org plans into hireable roles: scorecards, levels, realistic compensation expectations, defensible prioritisation. Pushing back with data when a plan is not hireable as written.
• Structured interview loops and assessment standards for roles where the bar is judgment, independence and integrity rather than measurable hard skills.
• Funnel health, source effectiveness, offer-accept rates and hiring outcomes, and acting on what the numbers say.
• A calibration habit across markets, so that "good" means the same thing in each one.
• Candidate experience: direct communication, clear timelines, honest feedback, absolute discretion.

Who succeeds here

• You have genuinely managed recruiters. People have reported to you, you have set the bar, run performance conversations and developed them. Team lead in name only will not hold with this team.
• You have closed senior corporate hires yourself. Head-of or Director level in Finance, Legal, Risk or Compliance, ideally in African markets: your own search, your own sourcing, your own offer. Or you have led the recruiters who did and managed the work through them.
• You have built hiring plans and defended them to senior leadership. The function heads this role serves are senior, direct, and hold recruiting to a high standard. The person who succeeds listens, diagnoses the bottleneck and pushes back with evidence rather than getting defensive.
• You have operated at scale. SaaS, tech, payments, banking, or another environment with real hiring peaks. Complexity seen matters more than sector.
• You hold a role open rather than close it with the wrong person, and can explain that trade-off to an impatient stakeholder.
• French is a strong plus. Fintech, banking or professional services background is a plus.

Process

Conversations with Africa Rising first, where we go deep on the points above. We then introduce you to the client for their own process: a hiring manager conversation, a leadership conversation, and a stakeholder conversation with the head of one of the functions this role serves. There is no take-home assignment.