Since then, we’ve facilitated 6 cohorts for ~300 people across 12 different countries, with the majority of participants in Nigeria, South Africa, and Kenya.

It’s been a ton of fun! We hosted ~35 IRL socials, organized 180 peer group sessions, and gotten to know incredible talent. You can some of them profiled here.

It’s also been a lot of work. We conducted over 1200 intro calls, countless job search coaching sessions, 10 reverse demo days, and reached out to over 1,000 web3 companies to see if they’d be open to hiring talent from the community.

This week we kicked off our final fellowship program which concludes at the end of August.

We’re stopping these programs because, unsurprisingly, placing talent in Web3 has gotten incredibly difficult over the last year. Our mission has always been to help African talent find amazing remote jobs and unfortunately, the Web3 space just doesn’t hold as much opportunity as it used to.

Last year the crypto boom brought very high-paid remote jobs to Africans –  and while this is still happening, we’re seeing maybe 20% of the interest from hiring partners as before.

We’re not sure how long it will take for hiring to pick back up. It may take years before new products and services gain adoption. So, we’ve decided to stop running new cohorts until market conditions change.

In the meantime, we’ll continue to support the community by sharing job opportunities, providing career coaching, and running occasional IRL socials.

We’re super grateful for the support of the Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web which made these programs possible, and also for our fellowship alumni who share their expertise, job opportunities, and networks with one another.

If you’re a web3 company and are open to hiring on the continent, we’d still love to connect you with great talent. Feel free to reach out.

What’s next?

Last year we started experimenting with paid recruiting projects outside the Web3 space. We started Sourcing Sprints - a new kind of service focused on helping early-stage founders hire. Unlike a traditional recruiter, we don’t speak with candidates. Our focus is on identifying the right talent and helping founders set up 15-25 intro calls with them.

This has gone super well, and we’ve now run sourcing sprints for 11 different companies. Most of them are VC-funded startups based in the US but we also have some African clients like Stears, Kibo School, Jaza Energy, and Impact Water.

We now have a team of 5 sourcers focused on this full-time and we want to double that team by the end of the year. To help with this, we’re launching our second cohort-based program, Sourcing Camp!

Sourcing Camp

Over the last decade, sourcing has emerged as a specialized job separate from recruiting. It’s similar to lead generation in sales and is focused on finding and engaging the right people for open jobs.

Over the next decade, sourcing jobs will continue to grow. First, because as the world has gotten more specialized, many roles have gotten harder to fill. The second is because of remote work. More companies than ever are competing to recruit from around the world, so finding and attracting the right people just got way more important.

Yet, most people fall into sourcing by chance and only learn how to source on the job. This has caused a shortage of sourcing talent. Even Meta has its own Sourcing Development Program to make it easier for them to hire good sourcers.

Our goal with Sourcing Camp is twofold. We want to build a pipeline of talent for us to hire from. We also think sourcing is a pretty great career and want to help people try it out.

We ran a beta version of the camp back in February for 20 people which went great, so last week we started recruiting for our first full cohort.

The program is free, lasts 6 weeks part-time and all events are in the evenings so it’s possible to participate while working a full-time job. Each session is led live by one of our team members over Zoom and includes hands-on practice.

Even if you’ve never sourced before, this is an opportunity to experiment with something new. If you’re interested, I’d encourage you to learn more here and apply today!

‍