Senior Talent Acquisition Leadership Role, Scaling Markets

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 investing heavily in the markets where its product has already proven itself and the job is now getting it into as many hands as possible.

Cash in and cash out run through a large agent network, which makes field and agent hiring central to how the business grows. The talent acquisition team is organised by functional specialism, and 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 are a hands-on operator and a builder of recruiters. You own operations recruiting strategy, team and delivery across the company's scaling markets, beginning with a Central African market where hiring volume is highest and the local playbook does not exist yet.

You hire the field, agent, customer experience and operations teams that turn a market launch into a functioning business, and you build the local recruiting capability that keeps delivering after launch.

You report to the Head of Operations Recruiting and start with three recruiters: one already in market, two being hired. Within roughly six months, recruiters in neighbouring scaling markets roll under you, and the longer-term intent is for this role to own hiring across Central Africa. Live volume runs to hundreds of concurrent open roles across three countries. Tracking it, distributing it and keeping the funnel honest is the daily job.

What you will own

• End-to-end operations recruiting delivery across scaling markets: pipeline, capacity and time-to-fill against launch and growth plans.
• Leading, coaching and growing a distributed team of recruiters: expectations, weekly pipeline reviews, raising the sourcing bar.
• The scaling-market recruiting playbook: role scorecards, structured interview loops, assessment standards, and local sourcing channels that work where LinkedIn does not.
• Translating country and operations leaders' business plans into realistic hiring plans, and pushing back with data when a plan is not hireable as written.
• High-volume and hard-to-fill operations hiring personally when it matters. You stay close to the market rather than managing from a dashboard.
• Local employer brand and talent pipelines built from a standing start: universities, associations, community channels.
• Recruiting quality and speed driven by data: funnel health, source effectiveness, hiring outcomes.
• Local recruiting capability so each market can eventually run its own hiring, and representing scaling markets' needs in global talent planning.
• Candidate experience in every market: direct communication, clear timelines, honest feedback.

Who succeeds here

• You have run volume hiring in sub-Saharan Africa. Significant operations, field or high-volume recruiting experience, with the numbers to show for it.
• You have managed recruiters and developed them. Not just allocated requisitions. The team you inherit is early to mid career and coachable; they need a manager who builds people.
• You have built a recruiting function or process from scratch: a new market, a new team or a new region.
• You are fluent in French and English, written and spoken. This is required.
• You are strong with data. Comfortable in an ATS, disciplined about hygiene, able to read a hiring funnel and diagnose where it is breaking. The company has internal analytics tooling; you will not build spreadsheets from scratch, but you will live in the numbers.
• You lead from the market, not the dashboard. You will get on a plane or into a field office to understand a hiring problem first hand.
• You can say no to a senior business leader and explain why.
• Experience hiring in the DRC or a market at a similar stage of formalisation is a strong advantage. So is mobile money, fintech, telco, FMCG distribution or another field-heavy operating model.

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 project stage, and an on-site day in Kinshasa with the country and operations leadership you would work alongside.