Kenyan firms face unprecedented challenges in recruiting and maintaining techies due to competition from established multinational companies.
Companies such as Google, Amazon and Microsoft have had the upper hand in fetching top talents, whom they remunerate highly compared to the local firms.
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Although small firms in the country are pushing to recruit young graduates and train them, the techies later leave for greener pastures affecting the workforce of those firms.
Since the firms cannot put up with the competition, they have been outdone in the search for talents and only keep their workforce for as long as they can sustain.
According to WPP-Scangroup CEO Patricia Ithau, the big tech companies are invading their talents with juicy contracts that are impossible to deny.
“You know, what’s happening in this market across all of us. We have some people called Microsoft, Amazon, Google who are just mopping up our developers,” she said.
“We have a programme we recruit from the university two, three months, they come in from college, and you offer them a hundred. Google tells them two hundred, there’s nothing you’re going to do,” she added.
The companies have invested generously in Africa and especially Kenya, seeking to offer tech-guided solutions to various challenges facing African businesses.
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The companies depend on talent from their area of operation, creating unsustainable competition.
Most of those who have been targeted are software engineers who help customise the companies’ applications and come up with new ones.
Safaricom is another company that has heavily invested in tech and has been on a hiring spree in the recent past.
This year alone, the Kenyan telco giant absorbed 400 software developers, evidencing how techies are in high demand.
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