Blog

So you have gone through a grueling job search process and now you have an offer(s) on the table. Beyond the role, the pay, the benefits, the location, and the esteem of your option(s), it is important to know if you will thrive and be happy or quickly start job searching again. One way to determine fit is to soul search and use your findings to ask the right questions. Thin...

How to Prepare for Your Skype Interview: At Kenyans Come Home, we help a lot of people recruiting from the diaspora. Some of our clients end up with virtual interviews. Here are 4 things that make these go smoothly (make sure you do a trial run). Your interview materials: Prepare what you want your interviewer to know Ensure you have your resume, key points you want the inte...

How To STAR During Your Interview: Behavioral interviews help your employer understand your motivations, characteristics and personality. They usually start with, “Tell me about a time you…” Success hinges on how you relay your story. The Situation-Task-Action-Result format is a proven approach. Below are 5 steps to develop a STAR story. Gather a bank of questions Write down...

In today’s world, your resume is not the only passport to your next job / career opportunity. Consequently, the same care and curation you put into presenting yourself on paper should apply to other media that you participate in. Specific to your LinkedIn profile, below are 3 key factors you need to consider. Your Profile: Your professional and personal brands don’t always a...

How to Define Your Personal Brand: Gone are the days where the only things that needed branding were the products in advertisements. In today’s world – whether you are living your life out loud online or still sticking to the traditional “person-to-person” interaction – impression is everything. Professionally, people want to know who you are, what you can do, how you do it,...

Like many who decide to move back home, Olivia Oeri was worried if it was the right decision. The current multi-unit manager for Pizza Hut Kenya had called the U.S. home for 15 years. In that time, she built a career she was proud of working for multiple Yum! Brandsfranchisees (Yum! Brands owns and operates the Taco Bell, KFC, Pizza Hut, andWingStreet restaurants). But with ...

For Patricia Maina, the move back home was a calling. The former marketing and communications manager for the Xerox Corporation had spent 13 years in the U.S. --ten years with Xerox-- and felt that she was missing a major piece of her life: a strong community. “As much as I was loving my career and my work, I felt that there was a bit missing,” she tells Kenyans Come Home. “...

In today’s business climate, experts have continually touted workplace diversity as a key factor in creating a successful company. A diverse workforce comprised of people from a wide array of cultures, viewpoints, and backgrounds is not just a nice to have. It’s essential. In Kenya, and other parts of Africa, diversity in the workplace is often limited to tribes/ethnicity or...

This week, we profile one of our corporate clients, Acumen Fund Inc., that invests in companies, leaders, and ideas. Acumen was launched in New York in 2001 with a mission to change the way the world tackles poverty. Acumen’s approach is to apply market-based investment tools with philanthropic capital to support entrepreneurs providing goods and services to poor and under-s...

It has never been a hotter time to invest in Africa. We at Kenyans Come Home have experienced a significant increase in recruitment requests from the investment space, making successful placements both at investment funds and their portfolio of companies. We have worked closely with impact funds such as Acumen, Novastar Ventures, DOB Equity and LGT Impact, as well as Helios ...

Picking Up New Skills In New Ways It is generally agreed that continued training and learning are paramount if you want to remain competitive and relevant in your career. But how you get that added education continues to evolve fast! Indeed, disruption is the name of the game when it comes to the classroom in today’s world. And a number of African startups have been at the f...

Rosemary Muyeshi believes that relevancy is the key to career success. It is an idea that as the new Head of Risk at Kopo Kopo —the FinTech company that brought us “Lipa na Mpesa"—she takes to heart. And when implemented well, has placed her in a company that is at the cutting edge of the evolving FinTech industry in Kenya. “I had previously worked at a financial institution...

An African woman CEO is still a rare and unique find, even in 2018. And the numbers back it up: only five percent of all CEOs on the continent are women. And only 12 percent of all board positions belong to women, according to the 2016 McKinsey report “Women Matter Africa“. Further, 18 percent of businesses on the continent have no women in senior roles while only 29 percent...

When Martin Mburu took his first meeting with M-Kopa Solar in 2015, he did not know at the time that he would be leaving his corporate job in the U.S. and moving back to Kenya a month later. Martin had been on holiday in Kenya when Kenyans Come Home connected him with the executives of the Kenya-based solar energy company. Within a few days, they offered him a job, and a wee...

Why does the informal economy of the side-hustle thrive in Kenya? To ask a Kenyan, “what do you do?” is a singular question that can lead to many other questions: “Do you mean what I do as my full-time job from 9 a.m. or 5 p.m.?” “Or what I do from 5 p.m. to 9 a.m. after work?” “Or maybe you are asking what I do on weekends to make money?” These follow-up questions showcase ...