The exclusive newsletter for Leaders, Founders, Managers, and HR Professionals. If you missed last week’s issue, you can catch up here.

🌋It’s been like Fuji House of Commotion

If you thought your work week was dramatic, wait until you see what the tech and business world just pulled off. We’ve got corporate departures, viral fake news, multi-billion dollar allegations, and a marketing psychological trick you’ve definitely fallen for before!

Grab your popcorn 🍿 because this edition is a wild ride.

— Dami

THE BIG IDEA

🚗 Uber officially exited Nigeria. But who really loses?

Earlier this week, news broke that Uber ended its ride-hailing services in Nigeria and Uganda effective September 2, 2026.

When the initial news broke, everyone wanted to know what was happening:

👉 Is Uber Leaving Nigeria? What We Know

Catch up on the immediate newsbreaker, key dates, and initial scope of the exit.

Now, the real story...

While the headline news is huge, the ripple effect is even bigger.

It’s easy to focus on the corporate brand leaving, but what about the real people on the ground? Riders, food couriers, and Moove drivers are suddenly facing a whole new reality. Sure, drivers are free to switch to other platforms, but many are still locked into heavy asset-financing and loan repayments for their vehicles.

We published a fresh deep dive going beyond the headlines to break down the human and financial cost of this exit:

👉 Read the full deep dive: Uber Left Nigeria. Here’s Who Actually Loses

🛑 Bank runs, internet rumors, and legal notices: The OPay Saga

You literally cannot make this up.

First, a fake announcement started circulating online claiming OPay was shutting down, triggering mini-panics and people sprinting to withdraw their funds.

Luckily, the Opay team was quick to debunk this cap, and allay fears all over the country with the catchy #OpayIsOkay campaign.

But trouble rarely stays down for long. X user @DrDanny2030 dropped a viral tweet claiming OPay paid an influencer ₦5 Million to fake the shutdown memo as a galaxy-brain PR stunt for their Live Townhall meeting.

OPay’s Legal Team:

OPay responded with a scathing legal notice, giving the poster until 11:59 PM to bring receipts or face heavy legal action for defamation.

I personally think the poster should do jail. And it’s also getting a bit tiring as this keeps happening. OPay faced similar rumours in 2024 and November 2025, and MTN, Wema Bank and May & Baker have all been hit with fake shutdown announcements in recent months. A convincing-looking memo about your business is cheap to make and expensive to survive.

For founders, marketers, and PR leaders reading this:

Crisis management isn’t just about dropping a polite statement anymore. When your business exists entirely on smartphones, zero-tolerance legal responses and immediate public proof are becoming standard operating procedure to stop digital bank runs before they start.

🔍 Sick of AI “Overviews”? Here’s a search engine for the old-schoolers

Ever feel like modern search engines keep forcing AI summaries and “smart” natural language interpretations instead of just giving you exact matches for the words you typed?

You’re not alone. A recent viral post captured the frustration of users looking for classic, boolean-style search results.

If you miss searching for literal words without AI guessing what you “meant” to say, check this out:

👉 Tool Recommendation: Marginalia Search — An independent search engine built specifically for non-commercial text, exact keyword matching, and discovering the web without heavy algorithm filtering.

🧠 Brain Food: Logic vs. “Vibes & Inshallah”

Ever spent three days reading battery and camera specs and watching YouTube reviews before buying a phone or laptop, but when it comes to trying out a new Bukka on Chowdeck, you do it solely because an Instagram review or branding looked sleek and clean?

In 1986, researchers Petty and Cacioppo introduced the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM), proving that human persuasion follows two completely different paths:

1. The Central Route (Logic & Proof): When the stakes are high, people carefully analyze facts, specs, and data.

   • Buying a Tokunbo car, choosing a real estate developer in Ibeju-Lekki, or selecting a corporate health insurance provider. You want receipts, specs, and zero stories.

2. The Peripheral Route (Visual Cues & Vibe): When motivation or time is low, people rely on visual signals, aesthetics, and short social proof.

   • Choosing a lounge for TGIF based on the neon lights, or buying a snack at a traffic light because the packaging looks imported.

💡 How to use this in your business or marketing:

• High-ticket/Complex stuff? Feed the central route. Show exact diagrams, specs, and proof.

• Simple/Impulse stuff? Trigger peripheral cues. Make it look sleek, bold, and funny.

• On Landing Pages: Hook impulse scrollers at the top with gorgeous visuals, then stack heavy proof below for analytical buyers

A SPECIAL MESSAGE FROM CAREERBUDDY…

⚡ JOIN CAREERBUDDY AS A TALENT DELIVERY PARTNER

Want full-time pay with total control over your schedule?

As a Talent Delivery Partner at CareerBuddy, you get to deliver on hiring briefs at your own pace; no unnecessary long meetings, no rigid schedules, and no earning caps.

• ✅ Work on what you want, when you want

• ✅ Earn based on your results (uncapped earning potential)

• ✅ Total flexibility over your workload

Let’s get you onboard!

Claim Your Spot!

THAT’S A WRAP FOR THIS WEEK! 🎬

From corporate exits to internet viral chaos, one thing is clear: navigating business today requires speed, resilience, and staying ahead of the curve.

If you found this edition valuable, forward it to a friend, founder, or colleague who would enjoy it!

Have thoughts on the OPay saga, Uber’s exit, or questions on working flexibly as a Talent Partner? Just hit Reply!.

Until next week, keep building, stay safe online, and don’t fall for fake memos! 🍿

The Workshift Team

RATE IT

Written and Edited By Damilola Koya

Hey... is this mic actually on? 🎙️

Let’s start today with a fast, honest confession.

Every week, I sit down to research, analyze, and write Workshift. I hit “Send,” watch the open numbers climb, get likes and shares here and there, but then... it’s complete radio silence in the inbox. Even when I ask for it…

It’s starting to feel like I’m standing on a stage giving a monologue to a packed room where everyone is silently sipping whatever drink they have in hand, nodding, and walking out the door without saying a single word! 😭

I don’t want Workshift to be a lecture; I want it to be a dynamic conversation between professionals navigating the same crazy market. So let’s make a deal today: hit reply to this email right now or comment on Substack; even if it’s just to type “I’m reading!”, tell me I’m wrong, or drop your take on today’s big debate.

(Who knows, something may be in it for you)

Oh, and if you’re wondering if I was guilt-tripping you about this… YES!!!

Anyway, guilt-trip officially over. Now, let’s talk about how the rules of doing business in Nigeria are quietly getting rewritten beneath our feet.

— Dami

THE BIG IDEA

The Scariest SEO Hack in Nigeria Right Now 🎰

Imagine clicking onto the official Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) website expecting electoral guidelines, only to land on an article titled “Discover the Excitement of Instant Casino France.”

That isn’t a hypothetical. Over 28 live gambling and casino pages were recently identified as hosted directly under inecnigeria.org under an old staff publishing handle.

Whether this is a classic backlink SEO scam or a compromised legacy account, the underlying reality is alarming:

If a third party can quietly publish dozens of casino pages on an official state institution’s website, what stops that access from being used to publish fake election announcements or misleading results during a crisis?

For business leaders, founders, and IT teams, this is a stark lesson in digital hygiene. Compromised access rarely starts with a massive, loud breach—it starts with unattended legacy accounts, weak vendor permissions, and a lack of continuous auditing.

The Lesson: Audit your company’s digital perimeter today. Who still has admin rights on your site from three years ago?

🔎 THIS WEEK’S DEEP-DIVES: TWO STORIES YOU NEED TO READ

We’ve published two major deep-dives on the blog this week that unpack seismic shifts in how we work and build in Nigeria.

🏭 Story 1: China Is Moving Up the Chain in Nigeria

For decades, the standard Nigerian trade playbook was straightforward: fly to Guangzhou, buy inventory, ship it to Lagos, and sell it at a healthy markup.

That middleman model is rapidly collapsing.

Chinese companies are no longer just selling to Nigerian importers—they are establishing direct retail channels and setting up manufacturing operations directly on Nigerian soil.

If your business relies on traditional import margins, logistics, or local distribution, this shift completely restructures your competitive landscape. Are you prepared to compete with your own suppliers on home turf?

👉 Read the Full Story: What China’s Direct Manufacturing Pivot Means for Your Margins

📊 Story 2: AI-Generated Slides Are Now a Staple at Conferences

While supply chains are shifting offline, workplace norms are being upended online.

When Chef Imoteda Aladekomo presented her deck at the Naira Life Conference, tech-Twitter immediately erupted because her slides were designed using Claude. The online crowd called it lazy; until attendees stopped staring at the formatting and actually read the contents.

This controversy highlights a fundamental rift in modern work: Are we evaluating professionals on the tools they use, or the value of their output?

If you use AI to draft emails, build decks, or write code, this breakdown is a must-read for navigating the social politics of modern workplace tech.

👉 Read the Full Story: The Anatomy of the AI Slide Dragging

💡 TOOLKITS & RESOURCES

⚖️ Building a Fintech Without a License Yet? Read This Immediately.

The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) has quietly opened its Regulatory Sandbox window; a rare opportunity for early-stage fintechs to test live products with real users without getting slammed by immediate licensing requirements.

• The Catch: It is documentation-heavy, and applications close at the end of this month.

• The Lifeline: To save you the headache of wading through legal jargon, the legal team at VaziLegal put together a comprehensive breakdown of what you need to apply.

• 🔗 Check out Vazi Legal’s sandbox guide

QUICK MINDSET SHIFT

“If you tell yourself or write down something about yourself 100 times, it writes into the neurofrontal cortex at such a deep level that your brain will start reconciling you to that. It just works.”

— Tobi Lütke, Co-Founder & CEO of Shopify

Shopify’s CEO used to be terrified of public speaking. His fix? For seven days straight, he sat down for 10 minutes and wrote “I love public speaking” over and over. A week later, the physiological fear was gone.

Whatever roadblock you are facing in your business or career this week—rewire the narrative before you tackle the task.

YOUR TURN (REPLY TO THIS EMAIL!)

Let’s break the silence!

Did Chef Imoteda deserve to get dragged for using AI slides, or are people just being overly sensitive about AI tools?

Until next week,

The Workshift Team

OUR SERVICES

• Level Up: Become an expert talent delivery partner with CareerBuddy, get matched with projects that fit your expertise, and get paid for every successfully delivered project.

• Hire Top Talent: Hire and get hired for top roles in Africa’s leading startups

• Partner With Us: Advertise your brand to our audience of 500k+African professionals

RATE IT

Share With Your Friend 📣

If you know this newsletter can help someone in your network, why don't you go ahead and share?🚀

Written and Edited By Damilola Koya

📌 From The Editor’s Desk

Hey gang,

Welcome to this week’s edition of WorkShift!

Today, we’re running a special WorkShift Town Hall.

We usually break down career moves, salary trends, and market updates, but today we’re turning the floor over to a fellow WorkShifter who needs our collective wisdom.

She’s 3 months into her first-ever job at a startup, drowning in 8 open hiring pipelines, and wondering if she’s struggling due to inexperience or being set up to fail.

If you’re an HR professional, founder, manager, or just someone who has navigated chaotic startup culture, she needs your unbiased advice today.

— Dami

THE TOWN HALL CASE: “Am I inexperienced, or is this startup chaos?”

“Hi Dami, please keep me anonymous.

I started my first-ever job 3 months ago as an HR Assistant at a startup here in Lagos. I’ve got my background in Accounting, so I had zero prior experience in HR or recruitment when I was hired.

For the first two months, things were simple: payroll, basic admin, and screening remote candidates. But now, my boss has thrown me into the deep end. I’ve been asked to fill 8 vacant roles by the end of this month.

The roles are completely different: Operations Supervisor, Quality Control, SEO Specialist, and Sales. We don’t have an ATS, as we majorly run Facebook ads and try to manage hundreds of candidates through our WhatsApp community.

I’m struggling to manage 8 pipelines at once, and candidates keep failing at the second stage. My boss says my process is too slow. When I told him I was overwhelmed, he said: ‘Just rely on AI. Anyone can do recruitment now because of AI; you don’t need years of training.’

I’m genuinely trying my best, but I feel like I’m drowning. Am I struggling because I lack discipline, or is it crazy to expect a 3-month junior to fill 8 different roles solo on WhatsApp?

How would experienced HR people handle this? What should I tell my boss?”

THE WORKSHIFT TAKEAWAY 💡

Before we open the floor to your replies, here’s our quick perspective on navigating situations like this:

• Sourcing vs. System: When you don’t have an ATS (Applicant Tracking System), running 8 recruitment pipelines on WhatsApp isn’t just slow—it’s an operational bottleneck.

• The “AI Magic” Myth: AI is incredible for drafting job descriptions and screening CV formats, but it cannot fix a broken interview process or evaluate culture fit on its own. (If you actually want to learn how to leverage AI practically at work without the hype, read our guide on How to Learn AI Skills in Nigeria (2026): From Zero to Paid).

• Scope Creep: Transitioning from basic payroll admin to owning 8 end-to-end recruitment pipelines in 90 days requires structured support, clear expectations, and realistic timelines.

THE FLOOR IS OPEN: WHAT IS YOUR ADVICE? 🎤

Let’s help a family member out. Hit reply right now and share your thoughts!

• For HR & Recruiters: Is filling 8 multi-disciplinary roles solo realistic for a 3-month junior? What tools or frameworks should she use to manage the chaos?

• For Founders & Managers: Is the boss right to say “AI can do the job, you don’t need years of experience”?

(Just hit reply directly to this email to leave your advice. We’ll publish the best responses in next week’s issue!)

WHAT’S HAPPENING

• The AI Recruitment Debate: More startups are replacing junior HR workflows with AI tools, but talent experts warn it’s leading to higher candidate drop-off rates.

• What Are the Odds? Can you actually get a promotion in Nigeria and end up with a lower take-home salary? We broke down this bizarre workplace math over on Instagram; check out the post here.

• Beat the Inflation Squeeze: With inflation holding at 15.43% while traditional savings accounts pay under 8%, your money might be shrinking. We did the honest after-tax math on what Risevest’s Naira Vault really returns versus a standard savings account. Read the full comparison.

TAKE A LOAD OFF

• 📖 Read This: Struggling with high-stakes office drama, composure under pressure, and toxic workplace politics? Here is What 90s Thrillers Taught Us About Work and Hiring in Africa.

OUR SERVICES

• Level Up: Become an expert talent delivery partner with CareerBuddy, get matched with projects that fit your expertise, and get paid for every successfully delivered project.

• Hire Top Talent: Hire and get hired for top roles in Africa’s leading startups

• Partner With Us: Advertise your brand to our audience of 500k+African professionals

RATE IT

Share With Your Friend 📣

If you know this newsletter can help someone in your network, why don't you go ahead and share?🚀

ABOUT CAREERBUDDY

Hire Smarter, Not Harder

At CareerBuddy, we make hiring seamless for fast-growing companies, we pride ourselves on knowing the best people who will excel in a startup. With a candidate retention rate of 90.3%, it is safe to say “We are the best in the game for startup hiring in Africa”.

We have worked with our partners to hire both for Technical and Non-Technical roles,  we have also helped them with expansion in Africa. Some of our clients include Bamboo, AAA Credit Limited, Vynt, FX Bridge, Shuttlers, Intron, LadderAfrica, Cadana, Fincra, Nordica Healthcare, Oval Finance, FortiFoods, Moniepoint, Sabi, etc.

Are you hiring at the moment? Contact us

Written and Edited By Damilola Koya

The exclusive newsletter for Leaders, Founders, Managers, and HR Professionals. If you missed last week’s issue on the ‘untouchable employee’, you can catch up here.

📌 From The Editor’s Desk

When you hear the word “arousal,” your mind probably doesn’t jump to spreadsheets, tight deadlines, or performance reviews.

But in psychology, the word refers to your level of physiological and mental alertness. Over a century ago, psychologists mapped out the Yerkes-Dodson law, proving that a moderate amount of pressure actually sharpens our focus, while too much causes everything to fall apart.

The problem? Most workplaces treat all stress the same. According to clinical professor Marcie LePine, workplace stress isn’t a single monster; it actually has three distinct faces:

• Challenge Stressors (The Good): High-impact stretch assignments or expanding your responsibilities. These push you into the “flow state” where you do your best work.

• Hindrance Stressors (The Bad): Unclear expectations, tedious administrative hassles, and unnecessary bureaucratic bottlenecks. This line slopes straight down.

• Threat Stressors (The Ugly): Office politics, toxic dynamics, having your ideas dismissed, or being excluded from team camaraderie. This is the fastest route to immediate burnout.

The takeaway? Challenge stressors are worth leaning into, but they must be limited in duration. If you wake up exhausted before your alarm even goes off, your system is crying out for recovery.

🚨 Quick Question: Hit reply right now and tell me; what is one minor administrative hassle or office bottleneck that completely ruined your focus this week?

— Dami

Does Being You Actually Pay?

IN PARTNERSHIP WITH

The Nigerian Bottling Company (NBC)

Being yourself sounds simple until it starts costing you opportunities.

Success often comes with difficult choices, but should those choices come at the expense of your integrity? Your values shape your decisions long before they shape your reputation.

On this week’s episode of the Youth Empowered Podcast, we are exploring the tension between ambition and authenticity. Two incredible young leaders, Nonso Eagle (Co-founder, PiggyVest) and Adedoyin Jaiyesimi (Founder, The Comms Avenue), are sitting down to unpack exactly what it takes to build a life without becoming someone you’re not.

They are getting deeply honest about:

• Navigating pressure and making difficult, values-driven decisions.

• Leading with conviction when the easier path is to simply compromise.

• Building massive professional success without losing yourself along the way.

If you’ve ever questioned whether your principles are worth holding on to in a toxic corporate environment, you cannot afford to miss this conversation.

(Got questions for Nonso or Adedoyin? Drop them in the comments of the video!)

👉 Watch the full episode on YouTube

👉 Listen on Spotify | Listen on Apple Podcasts

Follow the Nigerian Bottling Company on Instagram and join the Youth Empowered conversation across Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and X.

The Throwback: The Business of Showbiz

Everyone on the timeline is talking about Funke Akindele’s massive announcement for her upcoming theatrical release this December! 🎬

Few people understand the mechanics of building a highly functional, high-performing creative team quite like her. While we wait for her new box office disruption, we are taking a look back at the timeless corporate blueprints hidden inside her previous hit.

From managing creative chaos to the absolute power of brand positioning, here are 5 Corporate Lessons from Funke Akindele’s “Behind the Scenes” that every professional needs to learn.

👉 Read the Full Breakdown on the Blog

🚿 SHOWER THOUGHTS

“Just be yourself” is great advice, until you realize your authentic self just wants to stay in bed, ignore emails, and watch movies all day.

See you next week,

— The WORKsHIFT Team

Share With Your Friend 📣

If you know this newsletter can help someone in your network, why don't you go ahead and share?🚀

ABOUT CAREERBUDDY

Hire Smarter, Not Harder

At CareerBuddy, we make hiring seamless for fast-growing companies, we pride ourselves on knowing the best people who will excel in a startup. With a candidate retention rate of 90.3%, it is safe to say “We are the best in the game for startup hiring in Africa”.

We have worked with our partners to hire both for Technical and Non-Technical roles,  we have also helped them with expansion in Africa. Some of our clients include Bamboo, AAA Credit Limited, Vynt, FX Bridge, Shuttlers, Intron, LadderAfrica, Cadana, Fincra, Nordica Healthcare, Oval Finance, FortiFoods, Moniepoint, Sabi, etc.

Are you hiring at the moment? Contact us

Written and Edited By Damilola Koya

📌 From The Editor’s Desk

Heyoo,

It’s the first edition for August and I have to ask; where is the time running to?!!!

Anyway, with 8 months barrelling into the year, I can imagine there’s been a lot of stress coming in.

But if you think your workplace is stressful, brace yourself. This week, we are entering the trenches of corporate drama; from high-stakes tech buyouts that keep founders awake at night, to everyday office warfare involving petty exit policies and employees who simply cannot be touched.

Let’s rap. We need to talk about what’s happening in the market right now.

— Dami

THE BIG IDEA

Bending Spoons Buys Airtable. Should You Be Worried?

I’ve always been told never to trust a spoon that’s bent all the way back. Okay, not really, but I HAD to say that.

If you use Airtable to run your operations, track your content, or manage your databases, you need to pay close attention. Bending Spoons, the Italian tech giant famous for acquiring beloved software companies and radically restructuring them, just bought Airtable.

If history is any indicator (just look at what they did after acquiring Evernote, Filmic Pro, and WeTransfer), a very predictable playbook is about to unfold.

The Bending Spoons Playbook

1. Aggressive Layoffs: They move incredibly fast to trim operational fat, often parting with core product and engineering teams.

2. Massive Price Hikes: Free tiers shrink dramatically, and premium pricing scales up aggressively.

3. Core Utility Focus: The product becomes hyper-focused on monetization rather than experimental features.

What This Means For You:

If your company heavily relies on Airtable, now may be the time to audit your databases and prepare an offboarding or backup strategy. The era of cheap, flexible no-code tools is rapidly shifting toward high-premium monetization, if history is anything to go by.

👉 Get the full analysis on the blog

The Spoon and the Table

☕ THE WATERCOOLER

Two Wild HR Dilemmas Straight From the Trenches

One thing I absolutely love is opening the floor to real community stories. This week, we received two bizarre scenarios that perfectly highlight the weird, broken dynamics of modern office spaces.

Story 1: The Petty Exit Refund 🧾

*”An employee resigned, giving a flawless one-month notice. Months prior, they had an approved 10-day leave, which they took during the notice period after management explicitly agreed via email. The employee finished their handover, gave an extra day out of goodwill, and exited. Now, HR is coming back to demand they return to work the equivalent days or refund the company cash for the leave taken.”

*WorkShift’s Verdict: This is classic ‘bad break-up’ energy from HR. Once an agreement is locked in via email and exit documents are signed, trying to claw back funds retroactively smells like organizational spite.

Story 2: The “Untouchable” Colleague 👑

*“A company re-hired a former employee without an interview, purely through the backing of a powerful manager; even though this employee previously had huge clashes with the CEO. Now, a colleague needs a temporary relief cover to go write an exam. This employee is the perfect fit, and her contract explicitly states she can be redeployed anywhere. Yet, she flatly refused. Her supervisor spoke to her, her powerful manager spoke to her, her peers begged; she said NO. HR hasn’t told the CEO yet because they know heads will roll.”

*WorkShift’s Verdict: As one of our community members beautifully put it: *”Awon powers and principalities ni yen”* (those are powers and principalities). When an employee skips the gatekeeper, they don’t respect the gatekeeper’s rules

Got a different take/ verdict? Please share your thoughts in the comments! I’d love to hear what you have to say!

🗳️ #ClimbThatPOLL

While I wait for your replies, let’s settle Story #2, shall we?

Drop your vote; we’ll share the results in next week’s edition!

Here’s last week’s results, by the way;

🚿 SHOWER THOUGHTS

That’s a wrap for this week!

Whether we are talking about multi-million dollar tech acquisitions like Airtable or messy internal HR disputes, the core lesson of the week is structure.

When organizations bypass their own structures; either by hiring people through backdoors or changing leave rules on a whim during a resignation, they create chaos. A company without solid, respected boundaries will always find itself at the mercy of internal politics or sudden market shifts.

Protect your peace, document your agreements in writing, and don’t let corporate principalities ruin your week.

See you in your inbox next Thursday,

— The WORKsHIFT Team

Share With Your Friend 📣

If you know this newsletter can help someone in your network, why don't you go ahead and share?🚀

ABOUT CAREERBUDDY

Hire Smarter, Not Harder

At CareerBuddy, we make hiring seamless for fast-growing companies, we pride ourselves on knowing the best people who will excel in a startup. With a candidate retention rate of 90.3%, it is safe to say “We are the best in the game for startup hiring in Africa”.

We have worked with our partners to hire both for Technical and Non-Technical roles,  we have also helped them with expansion in Africa. Some of our clients include Bamboo, AAA Credit Limited, Vynt, FX Bridge, Shuttlers, Intron, LadderAfrica, Cadana, Fincra, Nordica Healthcare, Oval Finance, FortiFoods, Moniepoint, Sabi, etc.

Are you hiring at the moment? Contact us

Written and Edited By Damilola Koya

The exclusive newsletter for Leaders, Founders, Managers, and HR Professionals. If you missed last week’s issue, you can catch up here.

📌 From The Editor’s Desk

Dearest reader,

I’m always excited to write to you, but today, it’s just not a good time…

If you’ve been anywhere near Nigerian tech Twitter or LinkedIn over the past 48 hours, you’ve likely felt the collective heartbreak over GoLemon.

Founded by former Paystack senior executives, GoLemon set out to fix one of Nigeria’s toughest problems: making quality groceries affordable by cutting out middlemen and delivering straight to Lagos homes. But in a brutal macroeconomic environment, marked by soaring operational overhead and a tight venture capital landscape, they were forced to call it time.

While startup closures have become increasingly common, GoLemon’s exit hit completely differently. For professionals, founders, and recruiters alike, it leaves behind a masterclass in career equity and leadership.

I personally think it’s not every time a truly great startup comes with a great idea and equally great ethics, and it’s sad that we must come together now to say goodbye. So, I’m dedicating this newsletter to GoLemon.

— Dami

THE BIG IDEA

The GoLemon Exit & The Talent Goldmine

Most startup shutdowns end in chaos: ghosted vendors, dark apps, and stranded staff.

GoLemon chose a different path: an orderly, high-integrity exit. They cleared customer refunds, published clear support timelines, and immediately put their full weight behind placing their staff. With ~20% of their team already transitioned into new roles, the founders issued a direct call to top tech companies to snap up the rest.

Why this matters to you right now:

• For Job Seekers & Builders: How you leave a company defines your career reputation as much as how you build. The GoLemon team is walking away with their professional standing higher than ever; a powerful reminder that grace under pressure is the ultimate career asset.

• For Hiring Managers & Recruiters: Some of the sharpest, most battle-tested talent in Lagos, across engineering, product, growth, operations, and finance, is actively looking for their next move right now.

👉 Read our full deep-dive on CareerBuddy

GoLemon’s Graceful Shutdown

When It Rains, Does Your Business Pay?💸

IN PARTNERSHIP WITH

Shuttlers

Every rainy season, businesses across Lagos contend with flooded roads, heavier traffic, and employees arriving later than planned.

What many business leaders don’t account for is the hidden cost of those delays.

A disrupted commute isn’t just an inconvenience—it can lead to lost productive hours, delayed meetings, reduced focus, missed business opportunities, and operational inefficiencies that quietly add up over time.

So, what if you could measure that cost?

Introducing the Shuttlers’ Productivity Loss Calculator; a free tool that helps CEOs, HR leaders, and business executives quantify the financial impact of employee commute stress on their organization.

Calculate what loss of employee productivity could be costing your business here:

Shuttlers Productivity Calculator

If employee commuting isn’t yet part of your business strategy, it may be time to rethink it. Managed workforce mobility can improve productivity and boost business growth. Shuttlers help organizations make that shift through smarter employee transportation.

Explore how Shuttlers can support your business

Drop your vote—we’ll share the results in next week’s edition!

🚿 SHOWER THOUGHTS

That’s a wrap for this week!

If there’s one unifying thread across today’s stories, it’s proactivity.

The GoLemon team didn’t wait for things to spiral; they controlled their exit and advocated for their talent upfront. Likewise, as economic pressures push against your salary, waiting around for your employer to discover better benefits isn’t your only move. A simple referral or a proactive conversation can change your monthly numbers completely.

Take control of your trajectory, stay sharp, and we’ll see you in your inbox next week!

— The WORKsHIFT Team

Share With Your Friend 📣

If you know this newsletter can help someone in your network, why don't you go ahead and share?🚀

ABOUT CAREERBUDDY

Hire Smarter, Not Harder

At CareerBuddy, we make hiring seamless for fast-growing companies, we pride ourselves on knowing the best people who will excel in a startup. With a candidate retention rate of 90.3%, it is safe to say “We are the best in the game for startup hiring in Africa”.

We have worked with our partners to hire both for Technical and Non-Technical roles,  we have also helped them with expansion in Africa. Some of our clients include Bamboo, AAA Credit Limited, Vynt, FX Bridge, Shuttlers, Intron, LadderAfrica, Cadana, Fincra, Nordica Healthcare, Oval Finance, FortiFoods, Moniepoint, Sabi, etc.

Are you hiring at the moment? Contact us

Written and Edited By Damilola Koya

📌 From The Editor’s Desk

It’s Thursday again! And I’m always so glad to sit and chat with you!

All around you is silence, save for a phone screen illuminating your face at 11:45 PM. You open your LinkedIn messages expecting a game-changing hiring candidate or a high-value B2B partnership. Instead, you get three identical-looking DMs:

1. A legitimate corporate recruiter looking for a Senior Product Lead.

2. A pitch from a “crypto liquidity provider” operating out of a residential apartment.

3. Someone who has somehow mistaken a professional networking platform for Hinge.

Welcome to the modern Nigerian LinkedIn inbox; a chaotic, unmoderated marketplace where talent, high-grade hustle, and outright fraud arrive in the exact same format.

LinkedIn used to be the gold standard for corporate mobility across Lagos, Nairobi, and London. But as open-rate fatigue sets in and automated outreach tools take over, a major trust crisis is quietly eroding the platform our careers run on.

We broke down how professionals are building personal filters, why founders are turning off their DMs, and how to spot a high-value opportunity in a sea of algorithmic noise.

👉 Read: What Happened to the Nigerian LinkedIn Inbox

— Dami

THE BIG IDEA

The Google Effect: Why Everyone Keeps Forgetting You!

Try recalling the exact phone numbers of your top most-called contacts without looking at your screen.

If your mind went blank, even for a bit, you’re experiencing a cognitive mechanism known as Transactive Memory. When the human brain knows an external system (like a smartphone contacts list or a search engine) is holding information, it intentionally deletes the raw data to save cognitive bandwidth. It remembers where the information lives, not what the information actually is.

For business owners, HR leads, and marketers, this psychological shortcut is a massive hidden risk.

If your target audience (or even your own internal team) views your product or company values as something they can just “look up later,” you have zero mindshare. The moment a competitor places themselves closer to the user’s immediate workflow, you get erased.

Here are three ways to defeat digital amnesia and make your business stick:

1. Shift from “Searchable” to “Destination”

When people need industry intelligence or operational solutions, they usually default to a search bar. To win, your brand must become the primary destination before the search even happens. This is why forward-thinking African startups; from B2B fintechs to logistics platforms, are launching dedicated editorial, media, and research hubs. When you own the definitive resource in your niche, users stop searching and start coming directly to you. And not to brag or anything, but CareerBuddy’s Media & Branding service does this ever so brilliantly.

2. Embed Your Product into Daily Operational Loops

Memory isn’t built through passive awareness; it’s forged through repetitive action. One-off marketing campaigns are easily forgotten, but embedded habits create retention. Look at how top SaaS tools and consumer apps design daily check-ins, notification triggers, or routine reporting cycles. When using your product becomes a fixed item on someone’s daily schedule, brand recall becomes automatic.

3. Build Moats Around What Can’t Be Cloned

Search engines can easily index public features, basic pricing, and standard software templates. What they can’t index are proprietary networks, custom workflows, and community culture. When you build deep ecosystem value; like user-led forums, exclusive peer networks, or bespoke internal systems, the friction of switching away becomes too high. You stop being a replaceable vendor and become infrastructure.

The Executive Takeaway:

Don’t waste energy trying to make people memorize your marketing claims. Build an operational habit or an irreplaceable hub, and your audience will never need to search for a replacement.

FURTHER READING ✍️

Fable 5 Just Broke an 87-Year-Old Math Conjecture

On Sunday night, mathematician Levent Alpöge published a counterexample that disproves the Jacobian Conjecture; a math problem open since 1939, and explicitly credited AI capabilities with finding the solution.

The conjecture stated that a specific mathematical condition guaranteed a complex system could be reversed. The model identified a 3D counterexample where three inputs hit the exact same output, proving it impossible to reverse. Renowned mathematicians verified the proof by hand within 24 hours, opening massive new doors for advanced cryptography and computer science!

👉 Read the full story on CoinDesk

💼 WHO’S HIRING

Share if you know someone who’d be a great fit or step forward yourself.

• Head of Operations & Culture (Hybrid | Lagos & Abuja): 5+ years experience owning daily operations and organizational health in a startup or fast-paced environment.
  👉 Apply here

• LandWey Investment Ltd (Talent Pool): Pipeline building for skilled professionals (3–5 years experience) across all functions in Lagos.
  👉 Join the pool

🚿 SHOWER THOUGHTS

(A little practical philosophy for managers, founders, and people who sit in too many meetings)

"Let's make this viral" is not a marketing strategy. It's just a corporate wish expressed by someone who doesn't want to pay for distribution.

📣 How Did We Do This Week?

Have a great week, stay focused, and go clear those bloated inboxes.

— The WORKsHIFT Team

Share With Your Friend 📣

If you know this newsletter can help someone in your network, why don't you go ahead and share?🚀

ABOUT CAREERBUDDY

Hire Smarter, Not Harder

At CareerBuddy, we make hiring seamless for fast-growing companies, we pride ourselves on knowing the best people who will excel in a startup. With a candidate retention rate of 90.3%, it is safe to say “We are the best in the game for startup hiring in Africa”.

We have worked with our partners to hire both for Technical and Non-Technical roles,  we have also helped them with expansion in Africa. Some of our clients include Bamboo, AAA Credit Limited, Vynt, FX Bridge, Shuttlers, Intron, LadderAfrica, Cadana, Fincra, Nordica Healthcare, Oval Finance, FortiFoods, Moniepoint, Sabi, etc.

Are you hiring at the moment? Contact us

Written and Edited By Damilola Koya

📌 From The Editor’s Desk

Happy Thursday.

Last week, I wore a ring I consider a lucky charm to a client meet, and let’s just say, things worked out quite nicely.

Is that a coincidence? Absolutely, LOL. But try telling that to my brain, which has convinced me that if I take off the ring, I’m in trouble. I’m even searching for other pieces of jewelry that can double my chances!

The truth is, humans are pattern-seeking missiles. We are desperate to connect dots, even when the dots are completely unrelated. We see two events happen back-to-back, and we immediately invent a cause-and-effect story to make sense of the chaos.

But in the workspace, this exact shortcut backfires. It’s how managers assume a quiet employee is “efficient” when they are actually drowning, and how leadership mistakes silent compliance for genuine team loyalty.

Today, we are looking at the psychology of the patterns we manufacture, and what happens when the human elements of your business run completely out of sequence.

Let’s get into it.

— Dami

THE BIG IDEA

The Causality Trap: Why Your Brain Invented That “Success Story”

You restart your very troublesome router, and the Wi-Fi connection instantly springs back to life.

Was it the physical reboot? Or did your service provider’s network just happen to stabilize at that exact millisecond? You have no way of knowing. But your brain doesn’t care about the variables because it has already decided that reboot = solution. You will pull that power plug every single time the network dips for the rest of your life!

In cognitive psychology, this is known as Causality Bias; our hardwired obsession with linking unrelated events just because they happened close together in time. In business, your customers and your teams aren’t waiting for rigorous proof. They are busy manufacturing their own causal loops out of simple repetition. You see this play out every day:

• The 9:00 AM LinkedIn post that supposedly “unlocked” the algorithm.

• The new project management tool that “saved” the team’s Q2 targets.

If you understand how this mental shortcut works, you can build much stronger narratives for your brand using three simple plays:

• 1. Sequence Over Claims (The “Before vs. After” Timeline): Don’t make aggressive, hard-to-defend claims. Show a customer’s life before your product, the moment of adoption, and their after reality. The reader’s brain will automatically assume your product caused the transformation.

• 2. Date-Anchored Case Studies: The most effective case studies aren't just lists of happy quotes; they are built around a clear transition date. Highlight the exact week your client onboarded and overlay that with a hard growth metric. For example, local fintech giants like Moniepoint or Paystack don't just say "we make payments easy." They say: "Within 30 days of switching to our POS terminals, this supermarket chain cut checkout delays by 50%." The tighter the timeline, the stronger the perceived cause.

• 3. Product Ritualization: Turn your product into a mandatory sequence. When you prescribe a specific ritual for how your product is used, the ritual itself becomes the "cause" of the satisfaction. Think of how Indomie successfully ritualized instant noodles in Nigeria; we have highly specific, personal rules about the exact boil time, the vegetable-to-spice ratio, and the non-negotiable fried egg on top. The ritual turns a quick meal into an experience, making the brand completely irreplaceable.

Learn From The Best ✍️

CAREER & WELLBEING

Heartbreak Has a KPI: The Invisible Balance-Sheet Drain

Speaking of false causality: just because an employee is shipping their deliverables on time does not mean they are okay.

The Monday after her four-year relationship ended, Tomiwa shipped a massive campaign deck right on time. Nobody knew she had finished the last three slides at 3:00 AM, her phone lying face-up beside her laptop in case a message came that she knew wasn’t coming.

That’s the part nobody warns you about: the exhausting work of being completely reliable at your job while your personal life is entirely on fire. This piece explores the corporate cost of “presenteeism” and why employees protect the metrics you can visually track while their creative engine is completely empty.

👉

Heartbreak Has A KPI

WORKPLACE CULTURE

The Friend, the Lie, and the Promotion That Never Came

We are taught that if we work hard, stay loyal, and keep our receipts, the system will protect us.

Then a work best friend, an insecure colleague, or a manager with a smooth smile teaches us that loyalty without boundaries is just unpaid insurance on someone else’s career.

From peers who use the word “we” to hijack your campaign slides, to weaponized HR complaints designed to keep you playing defense, workplace betrayal has a very specific, readable grammar. This piece details the six architectures of office exploitation and how to spot them before they cost you your confidence.

👉

My Colleague Is A Traitor!

💼 WHO’S HIRING

Share if you know someone who’d be a great fit or step forward yourself.

• Head of Operations & Culture (Hybrid | Lagos & Abuja): 5+ years experience owning daily operations and organizational health in a startup or fast-paced environment.
  👉 Apply here

• Talent Acquisition Specialist (On-site Contract | Lagos Mainland): End-to-end recruitment specialist for a leading manufacturing firm.
  👉 Apply here

• LandWey Investment Ltd (Talent Pool): Pipeline building for skilled professionals (3–5 years experience) across all functions in Lagos.
  👉 Join the pool

📥 THE REPLY ENGINE

Let’s talk about the moment the “allies” became rivals

Our next feature is diving deep into the messy aftermath of workplace betrayal and broken office alliances.

We want to hear your story: What is the most calculated way a coworker or manager has ever taken credit for your work, or turned on you to save themselves? How did you realize the alliance was fake, and how did you handle it?

Hit reply and tell us your story. Your experience, kept completely anonymous, will shape our next big community feature

Share With Your Friend 📣

If you know this newsletter can help someone in your network, why don't you go ahead and share?🚀

ABOUT CAREERBUDDY

Hire Smarter, Not Harder

At CareerBuddy, we make hiring seamless for fast-growing companies, we pride ourselves on knowing the best people who will excel in a startup. With a candidate retention rate of 90.3%, it is safe to say “We are the best in the game for startup hiring in Africa”.

We have worked with our partners to hire both for Technical and Non-Technical roles,  we have also helped them with expansion in Africa. Some of our clients include Bamboo, AAA Credit Limited, Vynt, FX Bridge, Shuttlers, Intron, LadderAfrica, Cadana, Fincra, Nordica Healthcare, Oval Finance, FortiFoods, Moniepoint, Sabi, etc.

Are you hiring at the moment? Contact us

Written and Edited By Damilola Koya

In Today’s Email:

• The Executive Thinker: Rhaenyra’s line, and the five career gems hiding inside House of the Dragon.

• The Real Numbers: What dispatch riding in Lagos actually earns.

• Who’s Hiring: Roles across finance, HR, operations, and commercial.

THE BIG IDEA

Everyone on LinkedIn Should Be Watching House of the Dragon

Forget the dragons. Westeros is quietly running a masterclass in corporate survival, and the latest season just gave us the greatest out-of-office reply ever written.

Somewhere between the fire and the family therapy that Westeros badly needs, House of the Dragon has become something nobody expected: appointment viewing for anyone navigating office politics.

The realisation crystallised in the latest episode, when Rhaenyra — juggling a succession crisis, a fracturing council, and relatives who communicate exclusively through betrayal — delivered a line that deserves to be laminated and pinned above every burnt-out professional’s desk:

“I am awash in dilemmas and deficiencies. Let me find my footing and I will attend to your request.”

Whoever wrote that line, we know your pen was on fire. Because that is not dialogue. That is the perfect auto-reply email, composed four hundred years before email was invented, and it does everything the modern workplace has spent two decades failing to teach us:

• It admits capacity limits without apologising for existing.

• It doesn’t over-explain.

• It doesn’t promise a fake deadline it will miss.

• It commits to exactly one thing — I will attend to your request — on exactly one condition: when I have found my footing.

Compare that to the average Nigerian professional’s actual auto-reply, which is either nothing at all or a paragraph of apology that invites the sender to call your personal line “in case of urgency,” thereby defeating the entire purpose of being away.

Set your out-of-office to Rhaenyra’s line this December and watch how people treat your time differently.

But the Career Gems, as the timeline has taken to calling them, run deeper than one email. Consider what else the show has been teaching, entirely free of charge:

Succession planning is not optional.

The entire war — the dead dragons, the ruined houses — happens because one CEO named a successor, never socialised the decision with his leadership team, and assumed goodwill would do the paperwork. Every family business owner in Nigeria watching this show should be taking notes with a trembling hand.

Your title means nothing without stakeholder buy-in.

Rhaenyra has the crown, the decree, and the founder’s blessing. Her rival has the office headquarters and the people who control payroll. Guess who’s winning. A promotion announced but not accepted by the people around you is just a new email signature.

The quiet operators outlast the loud ones.

For every dramatic dragon-rider burning their political capital in one glorious gesture, there’s a Maester or a small-council survivor who has served four administrations by mastering one skill: knowing what not to say in the meeting.

Document everything.

Half of Westeros’s problems trace back to a deathbed statement with no witnesses, no minutes, and no follow-up email saying “as discussed.” If Viserys had simply sent a recap memo, thousands of fictional lives would have been saved. Send the recap memo.

Manage your energy like a queen.

Which brings us back to Rhaenyra’s line, because underneath the beautiful phrasing is a radical act for anyone raised on hustle culture: she tells powerful people not yet, and survives it. She names her state honestly (”awash in dilemmas and deficiencies” is, let’s be honest, most of us by Wednesday), takes the time she needs, and returns on her own schedule.

That’s the real gem. The permission. You are allowed to find your footing before you attend to the request.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be updating my auto-reply.

Learn From The Best ✍️

Lagos on Two Wheels: How Much Do Dispatch Riders Actually Make?

Everyone has a dispatch rider story. Almost nobody has asked the dispatch rider for his.

We did. Two Lagos riders broke down the maths — what they gross, what they lose, and what’s left after expenses, and the six weeks one of them spent off the road after a hit-and-run with no salary coming in.

👉 Read the full piece

💼 WHO’S HIRING

Share if you know someone who’d be a great fit or step forward yourself.

• Head, Portfolio Value Creation — Onsite

• Finance & Investment Research Analyst — Hybrid

• Administrative Specialist — Onsite

• Human Resource Manager — Lagos · Onsite

• Account Officer — Lagos · Onsite

• Senior Finance Manager — Lagos · Onsite

🥳 Relaxxxx….. with Tech UnWind

When was the last time you left your laptop at home?

It’s July. Half the year is gone. If we asked you to name one evening in 2026 where you were fully present somewhere that had absolutely nothing to do with deadlines, how long would you have to think?

Exactly.

Work doesn’t permit you to stop! There’s always another sprint, another launch, or another fire to put out.

That is why we are bringing TechUnwind back; and this time, we are wearing Owambe.

No stiff panels. No boring corporate networking. Just a pure environment for tech and creative professionals to exhale, eat properly, and laugh.

• 📅 When: Sunday, July 12, 2026 | 3 PM – 10 PM

• 📍 Where: Gameland Lekki, Lagos

• 👗 The Vibe: Traditional Nigerian Attire, live band, cold palm wine, games, and an after-party DJ set.

Passes & Packages: You can pull up in your own fit or grab an official TechUnwind branded cloth package (the fabric + entry ticket come straight to your doorstep so you just hand it to your tailor!).

• 🎟️ Regular Ticket: ₦15,000

• 👥 Squad Ticket (5 People): ₦45,000

• 📦 Cloth Packages: From ₦38,000 (Includes fabric, entry + free delivery)

Forward this to your team or your work bestie right now.

👉 GET YOUR TICKETS HERE

Share With Your Friend 📣

If you know this newsletter can help someone in your network, why don't you go ahead and share?🚀

ABOUT CAREERBUDDY

Hire Smarter, Not Harder

At CareerBuddy, we make hiring seamless for fast-growing companies, we pride ourselves on knowing the best people who will excel in a startup. With a candidate retention rate of 90.3%, it is safe to say “We are the best in the game for startup hiring in Africa”.

We have worked with our partners to hire both for Technical and Non-Technical roles,  we have also helped them with expansion in Africa. Some of our clients include Bamboo, AAA Credit Limited, Vynt, FX Bridge, Shuttlers, Intron, LadderAfrica, Cadana, Fincra, Nordica Healthcare, Oval Finance, FortiFoods, Moniepoint, Sabi, etc.

Are you hiring at the moment? Contact us

Written and Edited By Damilola Koya

In Today’s Email:

• The Executive Thinker: Why frontier tech giants are paying people to interrogate corporate assumptions.

• The Equity Exodus: Inside the pre-IPO talent wars stripping Google of its brightest AI minds.

• The Insula Response: Three strategic ways to leverage psychology and mute the “Pain of Paying.”

THE BIG IDEA

Silicon Valley is Hiring Philosophers; Should You?

Every few months, a hiring trend emerges that prompts equal measures of fascination and skepticism. This moment concerns the philosopher.

Across frontier AI companies, job advertisements have appeared seeking philosophers, ethicists, and scholars whose expertise in asking the type of piercing questions machines cannot answer— and other humans refuse to— is suddenly desired.

DeepMind reportedly already employs at least 10 philosophers. Meanwhile, in 2013, 1 percent of roles on PhilJobs, the field’s primary job board, were related to AI. In 2025, that figure hit 16 percent.

For decades, technology companies competed by hiring specialized engineers to solve purely technical problems. Yet as AI begins to influence education, healthcare, banking, and candidate screening, these companies are facing massive societal consequences. Unprepared as boards are to handle the ethics of fair usage and societal risk, they are bringing in deep thinkers from the humanities.

Engineers naturally ask how a system should function; economists ask what it will cost; lawyers ask whether it complies. Philosophers? They ask a different question altogether:

What baseline assumptions are we making, and how have they warped our decision-making?

As artificial intelligence begins to automate creditworthiness assessment at banks, candidate screening at HR firms, and insurance claims processing, we are facing the societal consequences of boardroom strategies. Letting the light into those shadowed queries is often enough to make any executive pause.

If this Silicon Valley hiring spree has any lesson for you, it’s this: Ensure someone on your team is rewarded for asking questions that no one else is incentivized to ask.

💡 What’s your take? Are we over-intellectualizing corporate roles, or does your team desperately need a “Thinker-in-Residence” to challenge bad assumptions?

Learn From The Best ✍️

Why Google keeps losing its best people.

In Silicon Valley, job titles are temporary. But equity is forever.

Google has been an obvious leader in the AI revolution, but all those gourmet lunches and wildly competitive pay scales aren’t enough to keep employees from drifting. Over the past few weeks, top talent has been walking out the door; and straight into the arms of agile competitors like OpenAI and Anthropic.

The reason? Pre-IPO equity.

Google’s compensation includes RSUs tied to an established, $4T market cap. Startups like Anthropic and OpenAI can offer massive upside before they go public. When a world-class AI engineer is looking at a generational wealth jump, stability loses to upside.

The recent high-profile exits:

• Noam Shazeer joined OpenAI (which filed for its IPO this month).

• Nobel Prize winner John Jumper left for Anthropic.

• Gemini researchers Jonas Adler and Alexander Pritzel are also headed to Anthropic.

In the AI race, your roster is a competitive advantage you can’t manufacture overnight. Google may have lost this battle of the talent wars, but the fight is far from over.

🧠 PSYCHOLOGY AT WORK

The Pain of Paying (And how to mute it)

It might surprise you to find that human brains process spending money the exact same way they process physical trauma. The phenomenon is known as the Pain of Paying. A landmark fMRI study proved that high prices or transaction friction actively triggers the insula— the region of the brain tied to physical pain.

If your checkout sequence, internal procurement loops, or pricing models are clunky, you are triggering an biological “spending brake” in your users. Smart companies design operations specifically to mute this pain spike:

• Make it invisible: Uber killed the checkout moment by automating charges the second a trip ends. The pricing doesn’t change, but the transactional sting disappears.

• Split the sting: Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) structures like Klarna chop a scary lump sum into four smaller increments. Four ₦15,000 losses register cognitively as significantly smaller than one ₦60,000 hit.

• Flat-rate the ticking meter: Metered, usage-based fees act like a running taxi meter, causing customers to ration usage out of anxiety. Shifting to flat, predictable pricing tiers removes the friction that throttles renewals.

YOU MAY ALSO LIKE

🛠️ TRENDING TOOLS

• Recall: Turns your saved knowledge into a searchable, conversational second brain that connect via API and MCP.

• Sern: Assembles a custom team of AI experts with distinct roles to investigate your hardest business decisions from every angle.

• Hedy: Runs discreetly on your phone during meetings, whispering real-time suggestions and contextual insights in your ear.

CHALLENGE OF THE WEEK 🎯

The Strategic Dissenter Audit: Allocate 30 minutes in your next management meeting to designate one leader as the temporary "Philosopher-in-Residence." Their sole task for the session is to aggressively interrogate the foundational assumptions behind your current Q3 targets. What realities are you ignoring, and who on your team is currently penalized for pointing them out?

🥳 Relaxxxx….. with Tech UnWind

When was the last time you left your laptop at home?

It’s July. Half the year is gone. If we asked you to name one evening in 2026 where you were fully present somewhere that had absolutely nothing to do with deadlines, how long would you have to think?

Exactly.

Work doesn’t permit you to stop! There’s always another sprint, another launch, or another fire to put out.

That is why we are bringing TechUnwind back; and this time, we are wearing Owambe.

No stiff panels. No boring corporate networking. Just a pure environment for tech and creative professionals to exhale, eat properly, and laugh.

• 📅 When: Sunday, July 12, 2026 | 3 PM – 10 PM

• 📍 Where: Gameland Lekki, Lagos

• 👗 The Vibe: Traditional Nigerian Attire, live band, cold palm wine, games, and an after-party DJ set.

Passes & Packages: You can pull up in your own fit or grab an official TechUnwind branded cloth package (the fabric + entry ticket come straight to your doorstep so you just hand it to your tailor!).

• 🎟️ Regular Ticket: ₦15,000

• 👥 Squad Ticket (5 People): ₦45,000

• 📦 Cloth Packages: From ₦38,000 (Includes fabric, entry + free delivery)

Forward this to your team or your work bestie right now.

👉 GET YOUR TICKETS HERE

Share With Your Friend 📣

If you know this newsletter can help someone in your network, why don't you go ahead and share?🚀

ABOUT CAREERBUDDY

Hire Smarter, Not Harder

At CareerBuddy, we make hiring seamless for fast-growing companies, we pride ourselves on knowing the best people who will excel in a startup. With a candidate retention rate of 90.3%, it is safe to say “We are the best in the game for startup hiring in Africa”.

We have worked with our partners to hire both for Technical and Non-Technical roles,  we have also helped them with expansion in Africa. Some of our clients include Bamboo, AAA Credit Limited, Vynt, FX Bridge, Shuttlers, Intron, LadderAfrica, Cadana, Fincra, Nordica Healthcare, Oval Finance, FortiFoods, Moniepoint, Sabi, etc.

Are you hiring at the moment? Contact us

Written and Edited By Damilola Koya

In Today’s Email:

• The Olodo Uprising: Why the viral pop-culture war is actually an indictment of corporate structures.

• The Math of Waste: How useless meeting cultures drive top talent away from standard execution loops.

• The Oxford Breakthrough: A 40-year study reveals why your best employees are forced to break your rules.

THE BIG IDEA

From "Olodo Uprising" to Operational Reality: What the Ycee vs. Peller Debate Teaches Corporate Leaders

Rapper Ycee sits down on the Afropolitan Podcast and raises an alarm over what he brands an “Olodo Uprising”. His core argument? Nigerian society has fundamentally stopped celebrating intellectual depth and academic excellence, choosing instead to reward a hyper-viral, anti-intellectual “Peller culture” that prioritizes shallow streaming over substance.

The internet immediately fractured into opposing camps. But it was TikTok star Jarvis (Elizabeth Amadou) who delivered the definitive, numbers-driven clapback that redirected the entire conversation toward structural economics.

Defending digital creators, Jarvis fired back: “I went to school. I graduated. Since the government didn’t provide jobs for us, what exactly did you expect people to do? You can’t expect individuals with high intelligence to end up cleaning toilets.“

Let’s attempt to make a mountain of sense of that molehill to study the underlying operational gravity. Jarvis’s rebuttal, while it may be low-hanging fruit, is a structural indictment of how traditional institutions utilise and gatekeep human talent. Again, it may be a reach, but truly, when formal setups become too rigid, slow-moving, or financially unviable, high-potential individuals will naturally build their own parallel sandboxes.

The exact same friction plays out within corporate departments every single Monday morning:

• Founders are frustrated that their teams lack “original innovation” and a baseline level of ownership.

• Managers are pulling their hair out because workers keep bypassing official operating channels.

• Top Performers are mentally disengaging from bureaucratic procedures simply to ship actual results.

If you want your organisation to attract high-ownership builders rather than passive compliance watchers, you have to align your operational frameworks with the realities of high-velocity execution.

👀 See how to build a rapid innovation sandbox that rewards execution ➔

Learn From The Best ✍️

Your Best Employees Are Breaking the Rules.

When an executive or HR manager catches an employee skipping a mandatory compliance check, bypassing an approval pipeline, or deploying unauthorised software to close an account, the immediate reflex is to enforce disciplinary action. We treat it as insubordination.

But according to extensive data from Michael J. Gill, an associate professor of organisation studies at the University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School, this knee-jerk reaction is a critical leadership error.

🔥 Read the Oxford-backed protocol on managing workplace shortcuts with curiosity ➔

The Massive Financial Drain on Your Team’s Calendar

Might surprise you to find that corporate environments frequently trap high-performing minds in tasks that offer zero net utility. The absolute biggest culprit? The bad corporate meeting.

According to operations data popularized by Paul English (Cofounder of Kayak), companies completely misunderstand the true financial mathematics of open calendars. When a team lead books a 1.5-hour roadmap sync for 8 senior operators averaging an internal cost of ₦25,000 per hour, they don’t see it as a cash expense. In reality, the balance-sheet math is absolute:

Isn’t that a problem you’d like to solve? Luckily we’ve got the fix…

🛑Banish the presentation

YOU MAY ALSO LIKE

Now that everything costs a foot and an arm, an emergency fund is more important than ever!

How to Build an Emergency Fund on a Nigerian Salary

CHALLENGE OF THE WEEK 🎯

The Friction Audit: Gather your department leads this week and identify the top three administrative rules or approval loops that are most frequently bypassed by your staff. Are those violations a sign of lazy misconduct, or is your internal policy an obsolete bottleneck forcing your best people to work around you?

😴Idle Processing

Every time I come across "Per my last email", I’m reminded it is just the corporate, HR-approved version of "I have already explained this to you using clear, foundational words, and the fact that I am forced to type it again is costing both of us our youth and our joy."

Share With Your Friend 📣

If you know this newsletter can help someone in your network, why don't you go ahead and share?🚀

ABOUT CAREERBUDDY

Hire Smarter, Not Harder

At CareerBuddy, we make hiring seamless for fast-growing companies, we pride ourselves on knowing the best people who will excel in a startup. With a candidate retention rate of 90.3%, it is safe to say “We are the best in the game for startup hiring in Africa”.

We have worked with our partners to hire both for Technical and Non-Technical roles,  we have also helped them with expansion in Africa. Some of our clients include Bamboo, AAA Credit Limited, Vynt, FX Bridge, Shuttlers, Intron, LadderAfrica, Cadana, Fincra, Nordica Healthcare, Oval Finance, FortiFoods, Moniepoint, Sabi, etc.

Are you hiring at the moment? Contact us

Written and Edited By Damilola Koya

Timothy Oladimeji & Chika Nwosu share their personal stories on leadership failure.

The exclusive newsletter for Leaders, Founders, Managers, and HR Professionals. If you missed last week’s issue, you can catch up here.

In Today’s Email:

• How companies use independent contracts to slash costs.

• The ₦350k job posting that exposed a massive private vs. public sector divide.

• Real leadership mistakes with the heads of inDrive and PalmPay.

THE BIG IDEA

How the 43% Burden of Full-Time Payroll is Forcing a Contractor Shift in Corporate Nigeria

Pinch me if you’ve heard of this lately:

Full-time employees are called into boardrooms, handed termination letters, and simultaneously offered their exact same roles back as Independent Contractors, effective the following Monday.

The driving force? A brutal, numbers-driven calculus.

In 2026, keeping a standard, full-time employee on a formal payroll is no longer just about base salary. Thanks to escalating statutory taxes, mandatory PenCom matching, and strict compliance levies, the unmapped overhead cost of employment has ballooned by an additional 19.5% to 43% above face-value wages.

By shifting workers to a flat “retainer,” corporate finance teams are instantly wiping these liabilities off their books. But it’s creating a massive organizational deadlock:

• Founders are saving immediate cash flow but accumulating severe, deferred legal risks.

• Operations Managers are losing the administrative leverage to enforce strict 9-to-5 schedules.

• HR Directors are caught in a cultural vacuum trying to build team loyalty without offering job security.

How does the math actually break down on a balance sheet, and where does your organization draw the line between strategic agility and costly legal misclassification?

👀See the raw balance-sheet math

Learn From The Best ✍️

The Leadership Lessons Nobody Talks About

Most leadership conversations focus entirely on the wins. This one focuses directly on the mistakes.

In this special video feature powered by the Nigerian Bottling Company (NBC), Timothy Oladimeji (Country Manager, inDrive Nigeria) and Chika Nwosu (Managing Director, PalmPay Nigeria) sit down for an incredibly rare corporate debrief.

They share the precise business decisions they got wrong, the severe structural consequences that followed, and the exact frameworks they deployed to rebuild trust, realign teams, and recover commercial momentum.

It is honest, practical, and refreshingly real.

🍿Watch two top executives talk about their absolute worst corporate mistakes

OR Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Follow them on Facebook, LinkedIn, X, and the Nigerian Bottling Company on Instagram.

How Much Is A Nigerian HR Officer Worth?

It takes very little to spark an industry-wide debate on corporate compensation in Nigeria, but a recent job posting for a mid-level HR/Admin Officer based in Ibadan exposed a profound philosophical divide within the profession itself.

The mandate: 3 to 5 years of experience, a preferred CIPM certification, and a multi-functional portfolio in the energy sector. The budget? ₦300,000 to ₦350,000.

The subsequent backlash split practitioners into two distinct camps, but the real friction is a fascinating 2026 legislative paradox.

So, we sat down with a roundtable of industry leaders to break down what the profession is actually worth.

🔥 Is ₦350k an insult or market reality?

CHALLENGE OF THE WEEK 🎯

The Structural Audit: Sit down with your finance lead this week and calculate the exact non-salary overhead percentage of your current full-time employees. Are your current “contractor” frameworks legally safe, or are you sitting on an unmapped labor dispute?

😴Idle Processing

Thinking about the fact that "Please find attached" is just corporate code for "I am begging you to read the document I spent four hours formatting so I can log off and look at memes.

Share With Your Friend 📣

If you know this newsletter can help someone in your network, why don't you go ahead and share?🚀

ABOUT CAREERBUDDY

Hire Smarter, Not Harder

At CareerBuddy, we make hiring seamless for fast-growing companies, we pride ourselves on knowing the best people who will excel in a startup. With a candidate retention rate of 90.3%, it is safe to say “We are the best in the game for startup hiring in Africa”.

We have worked with our partners to hire both for Technical and Non-Technical roles,  we have also helped them with expansion in Africa. Some of our clients include Bamboo, AAA Credit Limited, Vynt, FX Bridge, Shuttlers, Intron, LadderAfrica, Cadana, Fincra, Nordica Healthcare, Oval Finance, FortiFoods, Moniepoint, Sabi, etc.

Are you hiring at the moment? Contact us

Written and Edited By Damilola Koya

Raenest is opening ALL the doors to the world for you. Step into it.

Welcome to another edition of WorkShift; the newsletter for leaders, founders, managers, and HR teams navigating work across Africa and beyond.

If you missed last week’s issue, catch up here.

In Today’s Email:

• A grant many African founders will never hear about.

• Why “smart” job-search tricks can backfire badly.

• A better way to think about work, money, and movement across borders.

— Dami

THE BIG IDEA

Your hiring AI just became a social engineering target

Someone figured out how to hack the hiring process; and they didn’t need a single line of code to do it.

Last week, a job seeker on X shared that she’d been rejected from a role she was confident about, and the reason stopped a lot of people mid-scroll: she’d hidden a block of text in her resume — white font on white background, completely invisible to the human eye — that said something like

The company’s AI screener caught it. She lost the job.

Here’s the part that should give you pause though: she only got caught because the system flagged it. How many didn’t?

Within hours of her post going up, other job seekers were asking her for the exact text to copy. This isn’t an isolated incident anymore; it’s a technique spreading in real time, to people with no technical background, via a Twitter thread. If your organization uses AI-assisted screening (and most do, or soon will), your pipeline now has a social engineering surface that most HR teams aren’t thinking about yet.organization

The prompt injection attack (which is what this is) works by treating your screening tool’s AI like any other language model: give it instructions, and it may follow them. A resume is just an input. So is a cover letter, a LinkedIn profile, or any document your system ingests.

None of this means you need to scrap AI screening. It means you need to treat it the way you’d treat any other system with a security model; with human checkpoints, periodic auditing, and clear policies around what automated rejection actually means in your process. Catching one attempt is luck. Building something resilient to it is leadership.

Worth doing this week: Have a conversation with whoever manages your hiring tech stack. Ask them what your current screening tool does when it encounters unusual formatting or embedded instructions in a resume. If they don’t know, that’s your answer.

For the people doing life across borders

FROM OUR FRIENDS

Raenest

The modern work life is a little wild.

You can be on a Zoom call with a team spread across three countries, approving invoices from one market, waiting on payment from another, and trying to sort out family responsibilities before the day is over. So when a financial tool actually makes life easier, that is worth paying attention to.

Raenest is built for people like that.

If you’re sending money across borders, paying for services, receiving income from international gigs, or simply trying to keep your money life organized across multiple countries, Raenest gives you one app to handle it all. Fast transfers, reliable payments, and a simpler way to manage global money without unnecessary stress.

That is why it works for career-focused professionals, operators, women building across markets, and diaspora communities staying connected to home. It’s also why people who are constantly on the move — professionally, financially, or geographically — keep looking for better ways to use it.

Because the goal is not just moving money. It’s moving money without the headache.

See how Raenest makes cross-border money simpler

The best opportunities are often the hardest to notice

A lot of people assume the problem is always lack of money, lack of talent, or lack of ideas. But very often, the real problem is simpler: the right opportunity exists, but the right people never see it.

That’s true for grants. It’s true for jobs. It’s true for the tools people use to build, hire, and grow. In a world where everyone is overwhelmed with information, visibility has become a competitive advantage.

And that matters because some of the most useful opportunities right now are not the loudest ones.

A Grant Worth Knowing

€50,000 for African innovators — no equity, no repayment

One of those quiet opportunities is FCI4Africa Open Call 1.

It offers up to €50,000 per project to African tech innovators and researchers, with no equity and no repayment required. The call prioritizes work in digital innovation, health, agriculture, and financial inclusion, and it is open across the continent. Deadline: June 30.

What makes this especially interesting is that it is funding per project, not per company. That means it could be useful for people building targeted solutions, conducting research-driven work, or running a specific pilot that addresses a clear problem.

In a market where most founders chase the same familiar capital sources, this is exactly the kind of opportunity that can change a trajectory; if you hear about it in time.

Check This Out

😴Idle Processing

"Let's take this offline" is just a polite way of saying this meeting has a meeting inside it.

Share With Your Friend 📣

If you know this newsletter can help someone in your network, why don't you go ahead and share?🚀

ABOUT CAREERBUDDY

Hire Smarter, Not Harder

At CareerBuddy, we make hiring seamless for fast-growing companies, we pride ourselves on knowing the best people who will excel in a startup. With a candidate retention rate of 90.3%, it is safe to say “We are the best in the game for startup hiring in Africa”.

We have worked with our partners to hire both for Technical and Non-Technical roles,  we have also helped them with expansion in Africa. Some of our clients include Bamboo, AAA Credit Limited, Vynt, FX Bridge, Shuttlers, Intron, LadderAfrica, Cadana, Fincra, Nordica Healthcare, Oval Finance, FortiFoods, Moniepoint, Sabi, etc.

Are you hiring at the moment? Contact us

Written and Edited By Damilola Koya

📌 From The Editor’s Desk

Bolt’s CEO fired the entire HR department last month and replaced them with a three-person People Ops team. The internet found this very satisfying. The comments were full of people sharing their worst HR stories, their most pointless HR processes, their suspicion that HR was never really there to help them in the first place.

And here is the uncomfortable part: maybe they are not entirely wrong (?).

HR, as it exists in most companies, has drifted from its original purpose. The person who is supposed to protect you is often the person protecting the institution from you. That is not a conspiracy. It is just what happens when a function optimises for risk management instead of people development, and nobody notices for long enough that it becomes the norm. But we’ll let you decide at the end of the read if you think it’s a valid decision.

There’s plenty more to get through, so let’s get to it.

— Dami

THE BIG IDEA

The CEO Who Fired His Entire HR Team Said the Problems Disappeared.

He’s Not Entirely Wrong. He’s Not Entirely Right Either.

Ryan Breslow dissolved Bolt’s HR department and replaced it with a three-person People Ops team. He said the problems disappeared. The internet found this deeply satisfying. We found it instructive; because the reason it landed so well tells you something important about what HR has become in most organisations, and the reason it is not a complete answer tells you something important about what happens when you remove the function entirely.

Read the full argument — both sides of it →

CAREER & WELLBEING

She Never Raised Her Voice Once. That Was the Problem.

The most damaging workplace behaviour is almost never dramatic. It is the colleague who qualifies every compliment, who mispronounces your name in front of clients, who asks pointed questions in meetings just before your presentation, who never says anything you could quote back in a formal complaint. This piece names what that pattern is, explains exactly why it works so well, and tells you how to recognise it before it has done its full damage to your confidence and your reputation.

Name the thing before it names you →

WORK-LIFE BALANCE

A Conversation Between You and Your Job

What if your job spoke to you? Well, wonder no more. Here’s the one dialogue you don’t want to miss, and it covers everything from the KPIs that were always unrealistic to the work-life balance that was always theoretical.

Talk back to your job →

WORK-LIFE BALANCE

You’ve Been Called Into an HR Disciplinary Meeting.

Do Not Walk In Empty-Handed

An HR disciplinary meeting is not a conversation. It is a formal process with a paper trail, and the organisation has been preparing for it longer than you have. This piece tells you the five documents you need to bring, what each one protects you from, and why the employees who walk in without them tend to walk out with outcomes they could have avoided.

The five documents that change the power balance in the room →

😴Idle Processing

"Unlimited PTO" is the corporate version of your parents saying, "Do whatever you want," which actually means you should absolutely not do whatever you want.

Share With Your Friend 📣

If you know this newsletter can help someone in your network, why don't you go ahead and share?🚀

ABOUT CAREERBUDDY

Hire Smarter, Not Harder

At CareerBuddy, we make hiring seamless for fast-growing companies, we pride ourselves on knowing the best people who will excel in a startup. With a candidate retention rate of 90.3%, it is safe to say “We are the best in the game for startup hiring in Africa”.

We have worked with our partners to hire both for Technical and Non-Technical roles,  we have also helped them with expansion in Africa. Some of our clients include Bamboo, AAA Credit Limited, Vynt, FX Bridge, Shuttlers, Intron, LadderAfrica, Cadana, Fincra, Nordica Healthcare, Oval Finance, FortiFoods, Moniepoint, Sabi, etc.

Are you hiring at the moment? Contact us

Written and Edited By Damilola Koya

📌 From The Editor’s Desk

EID MUBARAK!!!

It’s a public holiday. You probably have somewhere to be, something to eat, or at minimum a very reasonable excuse to do nothing at all. So we’re keeping this one short.

For starters,

Someone forwarded me an idea about what it would look like to see how your team actually talks about you when you’re not in the room. What if a group of your direct reports is talking about you at a bar after you've left the company?

They’d be honest, probably a little unkind, and certainly unfiltered because you're not in the room. What would your legacy be?

There’s a way to find out, and we’ve built something around it.

I will not tell you what it said when I tried it out for myself. But I will tell you while it was not entirely flattering, it had some heart, and it was more accurate than I was expecting. Would you like to know yours? CHECK BELOW

— Dami

THE BIG IDEA

If You Quit Today, What Would Your Team Say?

Most leaders or people in HR never get honest feedback. And it’s not necessarily because people don’t have opinions, but because the incentive to be honest is almost always outweighed by the risk. The performance review version doesn’t get it. And when you ask “got any feedback for me?” in a one-on-one or team meet you are likely to get more answers out of a CIA agent. It’s so funny how everyone treats it like it’s a rhetorical question. But of course, if they had the opportunity to; you know these birds will singgg

But since curiosity is itching to kill this cat so bad, why don’t we find out using AI? We built a prompt just perfect for it.

This prompt doesn’t ask your team anything. It reads what you’ve already written and infers the rest.

HOW TO USE IT

01

Gather the artifacts. Don’t edit them.

Pull four things: the last three pieces of written feedback you gave someone on your team (copied word for word), a Slack or WhatsApp thread where you pushed back on someone or made a call, your notes or agenda from your last team meeting, and a decision you announced recently plus the message you sent to announce it. Do not clean any of it up. The mess is the data.

02

Run this prompt.

Copy the text below into Claude, ChatGPT, or whichever AI you use. Then paste your artifacts at the bottom where indicated. Do not describe yourself. Let the artifacts speak.

COPY THIS PROMPT

You are an organizational psychologist who specializes in how leaders are actually experienced by their teams, as opposed to how they see themselves. I’m going to give you real artifacts from how I lead: feedback I’ve written, messages I’ve sent, how I run meetings, decisions I’ve announced. I have not edited these and I’m not going to describe myself to you, because my description would be flattering and useless.

Read the artifacts as evidence. Infer what it feels like to report to me from what’s actually on the page, not from what I claim about myself. Pay attention to the gaps: what I leave unsaid, what I explain and what I just assert, whose names come up and whose don’t, where I’m warm and where I go cold.

Then tell me three things:

1. The story my team tells about me when I’m not there. Not the cruel version and not the generous one. The accurate one.

2. The specific behaviour I’d be most surprised to learn lands badly, and the evidence in these artifacts that it does.

3. The one sentence a direct report would use to warn a new hire about working with me.

Be precise and a little unkind. Vagueness helps no one. Quote the artifacts back to me where they support what you’re saying.

Here are the artifacts: [paste everything here]

03

Sit with what comes back.

The prompt will return three things: the story your team tells about you when you’re not there (not cruel, not generous — accurate), the specific behaviour you’d be most surprised to learn lands badly, and the one sentence a direct report would use to warn a new hire about working with you. It will quote your own artifacts back at you. That’s the part that stings.

⚠ One note: Do not paste confidential company documents or personal data about your team members into a public AI tool. Use paraphrased or anonymised versions of the artifacts if needed. The point is the pattern of your behaviour, not the specific names.

ALSO THIS WEEK

JOB SEARCH

50 Most Common Interview Questions in Nigeria (And How to Answer Them)

Nigerian recruiters across banking, tech, oil & gas, and NGOs are working from a remarkably similar bank of questions in 2026. We pulled together the 50 most common ones, what each is actually testing, how to answer them without landing in the traps specific to the Nigerian interview context, and the sample answers that actually land. Whether you’re actively looking or just want to be ready, this is the one to bookmark.

The interview question bank every Nigerian candidate needs →

AI & TECHNOLOGY

How to Order Cooking Gas, Diesel & Electricity Online in Lagos and Abuja

With gas and diesel prices reaching a new high this past week, shouldn’t there be a more efficient way for you to power your homes and offices?

Your generator is not a business strategy. And neither is the forty-five minutes you spend sourcing diesel on a Tuesday morning. DEER Nigeria has built a single platform where you can order cooking gas, electricity tokens, diesel supply, and solar solutions from your phone — and have them delivered. You can also monitor your energy usage so you know where to cut costs and improve spending! This piece is a practical walkthrough of how it works, including the incentives available right now for users in Lagos and Abuja.

Order energy on demand — Lagos and Abuja →

💡 THE FINAL WORD

That’s our issue this week. Short, as promised.

If you run the leadership prompt and it produces something you weren’t expecting, that’s the point. You can reply to this email and tell me about it. I’d love to hear what it says! Beyond that, make sure you sit with it before you dismiss it.

Enjoy the rest of your holiday.
Dami from CareerBuddy 💛

Share With Your Friend 📣

If you know this newsletter can help someone in your network, why don't you go ahead and share?🚀

ABOUT CAREERBUDDY

Hire Smarter, Not Harder

At CareerBuddy, we make hiring seamless for fast-growing companies, we pride ourselves on knowing the best people who will excel in a startup. With a candidate retention rate of 90.3%, it is safe to say “We are the best in the game for startup hiring in Africa”.

We have worked with our partners to hire both for Technical and Non-Technical roles,  we have also helped them with expansion in Africa. Some of our clients include Bamboo, AAA Credit Limited, Vynt, FX Bridge, Shuttlers, Intron, LadderAfrica, Cadana, Fincra, Nordica Healthcare, Oval Finance, FortiFoods, Moniepoint, Sabi, etc.

Are you hiring at the moment? Contact us

Written and Edited By Damilola Koya

📌 From The Editor’s Desk

There’s something that’s been at the very tip of my mind for a while now, and I think it’s only prudent we hash it out now because this week’s issue keeps circling back to it from different directions.

The environment you work in shapes the quality of your work more than most people want to admit.

Not your attitude.

Not your commitment.

Not your skill set.

The actual environment: physical, psychological, energetic. The things surrounding the work, not the work itself. Don’t quite understand what I mean exactly? Not to worry; this week’s pieces should do the trick for you! But before that, understand ONE thing

The conditions you create or inherit shape what’s possible inside them. Get the conditions right, and the work gets easier. Leave them wrong, and even the most capable people will underperform.

Let’s get into it.

— Dami

CAREER & PRODUCTIVITY

Your Brain Is Lying to You About How Well Things Are Going. Here’s Why.

One snarky comment in a meeting. One bad quarter. One failed campaign. They will weigh more than ten good ones, and your brain is not doing this to be unhelpful — it was built this way. Negativity bias is the most consistently documented tendency in human psychology, and it shapes how you evaluate your performance, manage your team, read your market, and make decisions about money. The bad review does not feel disproportionate. It genuinely feels more important. Let’s find out why that is, and what to do about it, without pretending it is not happening

Why one bad review feels heavier than fifty good ones →

LEADERSHIP & MANAGEMENT

Are You Leading with Fear or with Standards? The Difference Shows Up in Ways You Might Not Expect.

Ask any manager whether they lead through fear or through genuine standards, and the answer is immediate: standards, of course. Nobody thinks of themselves as a fear-based leader. But fear in organisations is rarely the screaming boss in the corner office. More often, it is quiet and structural; embedded in who gets to speak honestly, who gets to fail safely, and whether the room full of people nodding represents agreement or just very practised deference. Find out where you lay on the spectrum

The leadership diagnostic you probably need to run on yourself →

CAREERBUDDY WORKLIFE

One more thing about environments.

So, we’ve touched on the mental environment (negativity bias), the leadership environment (fear vs standards), and these are all about the conditions that make professional performance easier or harder.

But there’s one more aspect that Nigerian professionals absorb so routinely that most have stopped noticing it: the energy environment. The generator running in the background. The diesel cost sitting in the budget like an invisible tax. The work interrupted at a crucial hour because somehow your units have run out. The mental overhead of managing your own power supply as a side job to your actual job.

We’ve been working with DEER Nigeria on exactly this problem, and we think the way they’ve approached it is worth your attention

The Generator Is Not a Business Strategy

Every Nigerian business owner has made peace with the same costs: the diesel, the maintenance, the interruptions, the mental load of managing your own infrastructure as a parallel job to whatever you actually built your business to do. It has been normal for so long that most people have stopped asking whether it has to be.

DEER Nigeria is asking that question. And they have built an answer.

The platform gives you access to cooking gas, electricity tokens, diesel supply, solar solutions, and an AI energy assistant (yes, monitor how much you actually use) — all in one place, on demand, without the usual logistics of chasing separate vendors for each. You ask anything about energy, and you get a real-time answer.

And the best part? You can buy at the most reasonable rates and get them delivered to your doorstep sharp sharp.

If you sign up now, you get:

→ 1 point for every ₦100 you spend

→ 5% instant credit every time you top up your wallet

→ Your bonus balance automatically goes toward your next order

All your energy and power headaches are gone with the click of a button

Power Up with DEER

That’s a WorkShift guarantee!

THROWING IT BACK

Sound Sultan ft M.I - 2010

I think it’s only right our throwback of the week is all about power, and what better pick than the ever socially-conscious croonings of the late Sound Sultan, with an assist from M.I Abaga.

Sultan made a satirical Afrobeat anthem mocking the government’s failed promise that Nigeria would have uninterrupted electricity by the year 2010. We’re certainly not going to mention how nothing has changed 16 years later. Oh no.

P.S: BTW, thanks for voting on the throwback poll from last week! 75% of you wanted us to keep Throwing It Back, and of course your wish is our command. To the 25% minority, we hope our walk down memory lane will one day convert you! LOL.

💡 THE FINAL WORD

Nothing much to say other than this: The conditions you build or inherit shape what’s possible inside them.

Worth thinking about, eh?
Dami from CareerBuddy 💛

Share With Your Friend 📣

If you know this newsletter can help someone in your network, why don't you go ahead and share?🚀

ABOUT CAREERBUDDY

Hire Smarter, Not Harder

At CareerBuddy, we make hiring seamless for fast-growing companies, we pride ourselves on knowing the best people who will excel in a startup. With a candidate retention rate of 90.3%, it is safe to say “We are the best in the game for startup hiring in Africa”.

We have worked with our partners to hire both for Technical and Non-Technical roles,  we have also helped them with expansion in Africa. Some of our clients include Bamboo, AAA Credit Limited, Vynt, FX Bridge, Shuttlers, Intron, LadderAfrica, Cadana, Fincra, Nordica Healthcare, Oval Finance, FortiFoods, Moniepoint, Sabi, etc.

Are you hiring at the moment? Contact us

Written and Edited By Damilola Koya

📌 From The Editor’s Desk

Hey, you

I’m in a bit of an oversharing mood today lol

Let us start with someone very dear to me: my dog, Snow.

Yes, yes, her name is a little derivative, I know. But I guess, as far as American Eskimos go, she earns that name not just with her white, fluffy fur, but also with the level of confidence she exudes, which I find personally amusing and yes, aspirational.

She’s barely a year old, but really does not second-guess herself.

She does not catastrophise. When something goes wrong, she shakes it off, finds the next interesting thing, and moves forward at full speed. Of course, as a dog owner, that poses more problems for me, but that’s a topic for another day.

I have been thinking about Snow a lot this week (because she’s back at my folks’ home), so I think it’s prudent that I wax a bit lyrical about some of the things decision makers can pick up from dogs. Surprised? Have a look at it in our big story and see if you don’t agree with me!

Then, we talk a lot about what it takes to be a great leader, but maybe the key is in NOT TALKING. How do I know this?

One of my closest friends, Ayoola, lives in Japan now, and a while back, he introduced me to the concept of GEMBA walks: the Japanese practice in which leaders leave their offices, go to where the actual work is happening, and talk to the people doing it. To listen. This week, we’ve covered what that would look like in practice, but before I let you dive in, a big shoutout to Ayoola! It’s coincidentally his birthday today🍻! In his honor, here’s one of the most beautiful looks at Northern Japan he took for me

— Dami

THIS WEEK’S BIG IDEA

Leadership Lessons from Dogs: What Great Leaders Can Learn

Courage, optimism, kindness, intelligence, resilience. A management professor who has spent years studying both leadership and dog breeds argues these five qualities — embodied naturally by border collies, Dutch shepherds, Newfoundlands, Rhodesian ridgebacks, and yes, otterhounds — are the same qualities that define consistently great leaders. Snow, my American Eskimo, could write a chapter on her own.

Read: Leadership Lessons from Dogs →

THE C-SUITE TRACK

Great Leaders Aren’t Yappers. They Listen

Most managers speak when they should be listening. The leaders who actually change organisations have figured out that connection is the prerequisite for honesty and that you cannot manufacture connection from behind a closed door. This piece is about what real listening looks like at work, why psychological safety depends on it, and how the Japanese concept of GEMBA walks might be the most underrated management tool most Nigerian leaders have never tried.

Why listening is the leadership skill most people skip →

CAREERBUDDY WORKLIFE

How Introverts Handle Confrontation at Work

Most introverts are not conflict-avoidant because they are shy. That is the wrong diagnosis. What actually happens inside the head of a non-confrontational person during workplace conflict is more specific and more interesting — and understanding it changes both how introverts navigate difficult conversations and how managers should interpret silence.

What conflict actually looks like from the inside →

NIGERIAN TECH

Your Generator is Not A Business Strategy

Every Nigerian business owner, founder, and team lead knows the calculation: how many hours of grid power there are today, how many litres of diesel there are this week, and how much of the budget is quietly being eaten by the infrastructure that was supposed to be solved decades ago.

DEER Nigeria exists to change that calculation. The platform connects businesses and individuals to verified, affordable clean energy solutions — solar installations, financing options, and energy advisory — so that power stops being a cost you absorb and starts being a system you control.

If you are running a team in Lagos or anywhere in Nigeria and energy costs are a line item you would rather not think about, this is worth looking at more closely.

Explore DEER Nigeria →

STATE OF WORK NIGERIA 2026

We want to know what ‘work’ actually looks like for you in 2026. Not the LinkedIn version.

CareerBuddy is building Nigeria’s first honest annual report on what professionals are actually experiencing at work: salary, burnout, japa intentions, AI anxiety, and the gap between what employees need and what employers think they’re delivering.

If you’ve ever wanted to tell someone in power what work in Nigeria actually feels like — this is the form.

For employees: Take the survey →

If you manage people or run a team, we need the other side of the story.

One question we’re asking employees: “Does your employer understand the financial pressure you’re under right now?” We’re asking you the same question in reverse. 6 minutes. Anonymous. Contributing organisations are listed as report contributors if they choose.

For employers: Take the survey →

THROWING IT BACK

Yemi Alade - Johnny

Yemi Alade’s Johnny was released only 12 years ago (2014), so under normal circumstances, I would not consider it “throwback material”. However, if you’ve been keeping up with the news lately, you may have heard that Nollywood actor and one-time heartthrob Alex Ekubo passed away after succumbing to a long bout with cancer. He was the titular Johnny in the video, and I think it’s just right to pay a little homage to him. RIP Alex Ekubo!

💡 THE FINAL WORD

Whatever you do at the end of this newsletter, take a moment and FILL THAT SURVEY! If not for my sake, for the sake of lovely Snow🐩

Thank you!

Back next week,
Dami from CareerBuddy 💛

Share With Your Friend 📣

If you know this newsletter can help someone in your network, why don't you go ahead and share?🚀

ABOUT CAREERBUDDY

Hire Smarter, Not Harder

At CareerBuddy, we make hiring seamless for fast-growing companies, we pride ourselves on knowing the best people who will excel in a startup. With a candidate retention rate of 90.3%, it is safe to say “We are the best in the game for startup hiring in Africa”.

We have worked with our partners to hire both for Technical and Non-Technical roles,  we have also helped them with expansion in Africa. Some of our clients include Bamboo, AAA Credit Limited, Vynt, FX Bridge, Shuttlers, Intron, LadderAfrica, Cadana, Fincra, Nordica Healthcare, Oval Finance, FortiFoods, Moniepoint, Sabi, etc.

Are you hiring at the moment? Contact us

Written and Edited By Damilola Koya

📌 From The Editor’s Desk

Does your company have a phrase that only people inside understand?

A set of values printed somewhere that everyone can recite but nobody can explain? A founder whose vision is treated less like a strategy and more like a prophecy (maybe you are even that founder yourself 👀)?

A general sense that the right answer to any question is whatever the culture says it is?

Okay, relaxxx.

We are not saying your workplace is a cult. Allegedly. But really, how do you know if your company is really a cult? We have just the thing! Also, would you make a good or terrible cult member? Find out!

Of course, the entire internet has been buzzing over Moniepoint CEO Tosin Eniolorunda’s speech on Nigeria’s talent gap, and we have a few thoughts of our own. While we’re on that, how should HR leaders actually be using AI in 2026? We pull insights from a former CHRO at Patagonia, and then there’s this guy who’s doing about 220k USD a month selling supplements on Facebook. Don’t believe me? Check it out yourself.

Plus: Clock Out by CB just launched. What’s that? More below.

— Dami

CAREERBUDDY WORKLIFE

Is Your Workplace a Cult? (We’re Only Asking Because the Research Is Right There)

What started out as a funny piece about why most of us would make terrible cult members took a serious left turn. In my research, I found an LSE research paper on five signs your company culture has gone full cult mode, with so many factors that I might need a moment to think back over the years. The overlap between the documentary and your Monday standup is certainly something you need to check out.

I compel you to do so😈 (just kidding)

Read: Why You’d Be a Terrible Cult Member →

THE C-SUITE TRACK

The Moniepoint CEO Speech on Nigeria’s Talent Gap — Unpacked

The speech went viral. The comments and opinions went on longer. Tosin Eniolorunda made an argument about the state of Nigerian talent that landed somewhere between an uncomfortable truth and a convenient excuse, and the backlash on the net suggests people have strong feelings about which side it falls on. We unpacked the full argument so you can decide for yourself.

Read the full breakdown and form your own view →

HR GUIDES

How HR Leaders Should Actually Be Using AI in 2026

A former CHRO at Patagonia has a specific and somewhat uncomfortable argument: most HR teams are applying AI to existing workflows, and that is exactly the wrong way to think about it. Not because the tools are wrong but because the workflows themselves are wrong, and AI just makes broken processes faster. This piece explains what the right framing looks like.

What the Patagonia CHRO gets right about AI and HR →

MONEY STORIES

How to Build a DTC Business in Nigeria in 2026

Nigeria’s e-commerce market hit $10.5 billion in 2026. One entrepreneur is doing ₦220 million a month selling supplements on Facebook. This is not a motivational story. It is a breakdown of the specific mechanics — product selection, Facebook ad architecture, payment stack, fulfilment — that make direct-to-consumer work in the Nigerian market right now.

The DTC playbook that’s actually working in Nigeria →

INTRODUCING: CLOCK OUT BY CB

For Nigerian professionals who work hard — and play harder.

We built WorkShift for your 9-to-5 brain. ClockOut by CB is for everything after you shut down your PC.

It is a community for professionals who want to actually live in their cities — not just survive. Restaurant spots worth the Uber. Events worth the traffic. Trips worth the leave days. And people to do all of it with. We solve the ‘who wants to go?’ problem.

Inside the community, you’ll find a bunch of sub-groups and interests:

The Big Screen — Films, shows, group screenings

The Reservation — Spots, group dinners, reviews

Away Days — Trips, staycations, carpooling

The Warm Up — Workouts, running, group sport

Absolutely no spam. No promos. Just good taste and good company.

Join Clock Out by CB →

THROWING IT BACK

Freestyle - Sip Easy ft. 2face Idibia

You may or may not recall this song so fondly, but former Trybesmen member and alum Freestyle (Mfon Essien), dropped this off his debut album Free At Last in 2007 to much airplay and chart-climbing (whatever it was back then). It’s a bit more recent than our usual throwbacks, but I think you’ll appreciate its fun and laidback nature as we close out the week, no? And who can say no to a 2face feature!?

Also, it was one of the first instances that the Nigerian entertainment scene was introduced to media personality and actress Moyo Lawal. In fact, I used to wonder if there was something between them as she appeared in a number of Freestyle’s videos, but before you blame me, consider that the tabloids were the ones who put this in my head!

💡 THE FINAL WORD

Wouldn’t it be too crazy if your workplace were an actual cult? What are the odds? Maybe I’m letting my mind wander a little too much, but what would you do if it were actually the case?

Sign of the Cross,
Dami from CareerBuddy 💛

Share With Your Friend 📣

If you know this newsletter can help someone in your network, why don't you go ahead and share?🚀

ABOUT CAREERBUDDY

Hire Smarter, Not Harder

At CareerBuddy, we make hiring seamless for fast-growing companies, we pride ourselves on knowing the best people who will excel in a startup. With a candidate retention rate of 90.3%, it is safe to say “We are the best in the game for startup hiring in Africa”.

We have worked with our partners to hire both for Technical and Non-Technical roles,  we have also helped them with expansion in Africa. Some of our clients include Bamboo, AAA Credit Limited, Vynt, FX Bridge, Shuttlers, Intron, LadderAfrica, Cadana, Fincra, Nordica Healthcare, Oval Finance, FortiFoods, Moniepoint, Sabi, etc.

Are you hiring at the moment? Contact us

Written and Edited By Damilola Koya

📌 From The Editor’s Desk

Welcome to the last edition of April 2026! This month has certainly felt longer than the ones before, leading me to wonder if it’s actually a 30-day month. Anyway, the payoff is that tomorrow is Workers’ Day, a public holiday for most people, and I hope we can get some much-needed rest! It also means today is probably the day the salary hits, the invoice is overdue, the client still hasn’t paid, and someone somewhere is refreshing their app waiting for an alert.

Considering most of us in the WorkShift community HAVE to deal with other people’s payroll, wouldn’t it be ironic if YOUR own payments were delayed due to some platform wahala? Not to worry, though, as we’ve got the solution for our international payments buddies (you know I hook you up to the sauce all the time). And yes, it’s ranked by real user experience. Bookmark it before you send your next invoice.

The rest of the issue is pretty laid-back, so you can actually kick your feet up and enjoy this holiday with a few good and fun reads (you’re welcome, by the way).

Rest well. You’ve earned it!

— Dami

MONEY STORIES

Best Apps for Receiving International Payments in Nigeria (2026)

You did the work. The client is ready to pay. Now comes the part nobody prepares you for — which app do you use, which one eats the most in fees, which one actually arrives on time, and which one your bank will quietly flag. This is the ranked, honest, user-reviewed guide to international payment apps for Nigerians in 2026. Based on what people are actually using and what's actually working so you can get the best bang for your buck!

The international payments guide every Nigerian needs →

OPINIONS & POP CULTURE

What Women Actually Think About Online Simps

The discourse about online simping has produced a lot of opinions from men about men, and almost no one has thought to ask the women on the receiving end what it’s actually like. We did. Their answers are more complicated, more generous, and more clear-eyed than the discourse deserves.

The perspective that’s been missing from this conversation →

OPINIONS & POP CULTURE

Lagos 1851 vs Japan 1853: A Tale of Two

History buffs get in here. Ever wondered what could have gone differently with Nigeria?

Two years apart, two naval powers arrived uninvited at two different shores and delivered the same message: open up or face consequences. Lagos did not have a choice. Japan, technically, did not either. But what happened next in each country diverged so completely that historians have been arguing about it ever since. We take a precise analysis of why external pressure destroyed one nation’s sovereignty and galvanised another’s — and what the difference actually was.

The history comparison that changes how you think about both countries →

ENTERTAINMENT

Here’s What Everyone is Missing with Mavo’s ‘No More Way for Poor People’ Slang

“No more way for poor people” is a Gen-Z phrase coined by the latest afrobeats star, Mavo. It’s gone viral almost immediately, but most of the conversation around it has been either celebration or outrage, with very little in the middle doing the actual work of thinking about what Mavo said, what he meant, and why it hit the way it did. This piece does that work.

Is there really no more way for poor people? →

OPINIONS & POP CULTURE

Children of Blood and Bone: Why Nigerians Were Never Really the Audience

News of the “Children of Blood and Bone” film has arrived with considerable noise, and Nigerians have engaged it with a mixture of interest, critique, and a quiet awareness that maybe we’re not the target audience for this blockbuster. This piece takes a deeper look at that possibility, among other things: who the film was actually designed for, what gets lost in translation, and why that matters more than whether the movie is good or bad.

Are we children of blood and bone? Or not even in the equation? →

OPINIONS & POP CULTURE

Who Was Soboma George? The Niger Delta Warlord Behind the Legend

You may know this name from Burna Boy’s Last Last breakfast anthem. But who really was Soboma George? A prison break, a movement, a tragedy, a legend that the Niger Delta built? This is the full account.

The story behind the name Burna Boy dropped →

THROWING IT BACK

Craig David — “Fill Me In”

The first complete album I ever listened to was Craig David’s Y2K release: Born to Do It. I wore the disc out on my walkman from too much play, I’ll admit, but if you’ve ever listened to it, you’ll understand! A lot of you may be more familiar with tracks like 7 Days (a karaoke favorite) and Walking Away (the go-to choice for many a Pentecostal chorister to prove their vocal mettle in secular settings), but my honest opinion is they can never top the masterpiece that is Fill Me In.

And that’s a hill I’ll gladly die on any day! Give it a listen/ watch!

💡 THE FINAL WORD

As you’ve noticed, this was a different kind of issue — more culture than career, more thinking than doing. I hope it’s put you in a restful mood! We’ll be back next week with more seriousness [LOL].

Happy Worker’s Day, Rockstars,
Dami from CareerBuddy 💛

Share With Your Friend 📣

If you know this newsletter can help someone in your network, why don't you go ahead and share?🚀

ABOUT CAREERBUDDY

Hire Smarter, Not Harder

At CareerBuddy, we make hiring seamless for fast-growing companies, we pride ourselves on knowing the best people who will excel in a startup. With a candidate retention rate of 90.3%, it is safe to say “We are the best in the game for startup hiring in Africa”.

We have worked with our partners to hire both for Technical and Non-Technical roles,  we have also helped them with expansion in Africa. Some of our clients include Bamboo, AAA Credit Limited, Vynt, FX Bridge, Shuttlers, Intron, LadderAfrica, Cadana, Fincra, Nordica Healthcare, Oval Finance, FortiFoods, Moniepoint, Sabi, etc.

Are you hiring at the moment? Contact us

Written and Edited By Damilola Koya

📌 From The Editor’s Desk

For the umpteenth time, someone has tweeted something about Nigerian HR.

But before you get your panties in a bunch, let’s think about it. What does HR actually do? It might actually be the department of vibes, no?

Luckily, we don’t have to rely solely on opinions; there was an actual roundtable on this particular conversation! It’s our feature read this week, so let’s actually see where the truth lies…

This week, we’re donning our amebo cap in full regalia 😋, so be ready to hear some gist about Item7, the new digital oil in Africa, and some other things you’ll definitely be glued to your screen for. Especially if there’s a new hire at your office. Are they the rockstars they say they are, or is it just a purple patch?

— Dami

CAREERBUDDY WORKLIFE

What Does HR in Nigeria Actually Do?

Another tweet went viral — as tweets do — suggesting that Nigerian HR departments exist primarily to hire people and then disappear until someone needs to be fired. But what if they’re right? Isn’t all that HR does is to gist, issue queries, side with the oga, and goof around? No wonder Michael Scott hates Toby from HR so much!

Is the department of vibes good for anything other than that?

What HR does when it’s actually doing its job →

THE C-SUITE TRACK

How to Identify a High-Performing Employee in the First 3 Weeks

Most managers wait until the 90-day review to form an opinion of a new hire. The problem is that by day 90, the high performer has already decided whether they’re staying. The signals that distinguish the genuinely excellent from the competent-and-comfortable show up in the first three weeks, not in output, which is too early to be meaningful, but in specific behaviours around how someone handles not knowing things, how they move without being pushed, and what they do when nobody is watching. Here’s what to look for.

Spot your best hire before they stop trying to impress you →

OPINIONS & POP CULTURE

Why Smart People Don’t Rush.. Lessons from The Joker

The Dark Knight trilogy, especially The Dark Knight (its second instalment), is one of my favorite franchises ever. And this is purely from an entertainment standpoint, because it’s really just an amazing film!

But what if we PAUSE the show and could learn something from it? Especially from one of its strongest sequences involving the maniacal Joker (played by Heath Ledger).

It’s all about urgency and rushing…, and I think I should just shut up now and let you read what it’s all about yourself!

The case for slowing down when everything says hurry →

MONEY STORIES

What’s the Big Idea with Item7’s Buildings?

As a bona fide early investor in Item7 from the days when it just had one outlet at Tanke, Oke-Odo in Ilorin (and then the rapid expansions at Taiwo Road / Sango and eventually Asa-dam), one thing that never occurred to me was the structure of its buildings. Not until someone brought it up about one of the new outlets in Lagos.

If you’ve ever been to or passed by one, you’d get what I’m talking about. For such large buildings, there’s barely any visible entrances or areas to sit in. It’s strictly takeout. That seems like such a waste! And in this economy?

Well, there’s a reason! And it’s probably why they only serve two options on their menu, too.

The MBA case study nobody wrote about jollof and shawarma →

AFRICAN TECH

The New Digital ‘Oil’ in Africa

The continent has been looking for the next oil since before anyone was willing to admit the first one was running out. Gaming content creation is not the obvious answer, but the numbers are starting to make a case. African gaming creators are building audiences, monetising across YouTube, Twitch, and TikTok, and doing it without the infrastructure that Western creators take for granted. This piece looks at how they’re managing it, what the economics actually look like, and why the opportunity is bigger than most people in this space are willing to say out loud yet.

Read the piece on Africa’s gaming economy →

JOB SEARCH

Boolean Search on LinkedIn: How to Find Remote Jobs Faster

Most people use LinkedIn search the way they use a vending machine; type something in, hope something useful comes out, and get frustrated when it doesn’t. Boolean search is how recruiters actually find people, and it works just as well in reverse. This piece is a practical walkthrough of AND, OR, NOT, quotes, and parentheses applied specifically to remote job hunting on LinkedIn. Two people already used this to find roles they weren’t finding before. The third could be you.

The search strings remote job hunters aren’t using yet →

THROWING IT BACK

Azadus — “You Is The One”

In the year 2000, Kennis Music was basically the standard. And a sign of what proper standards were is the straight banger; You Is The One by Azadus. Off his debut album Just, it was the song you played when you needed to tell a babe something she might not believe coming from your own mouth.

That, and the fact that people poked fun at the ‘grammar’ of the song’s title.

The genius of the track is that it is doing two things at once. On the surface, it is a love song. Underneath it is a negotiation. You Is The One is not a confession; it is an argument. Azadus is making a case, marshalling evidence, presenting himself as the obvious conclusion. Or maybe I’m just waxing too lyrical because this is a personal favorite!

💡 THE FINAL WORD

I’ve yapped a lot this week already, and so I have nothing more to give you with our final word. I just want you to know You Is The ONE for us at WorkShift.

Stay hydrated,
Dami from CareerBuddy 💛

Share With Your Friend 📣

If you know this newsletter can help someone in your network, why don't you go ahead and share?🚀

ABOUT CAREERBUDDY

Hire Smarter, Not Harder

At CareerBuddy, we make hiring seamless for fast-growing companies, we pride ourselves on knowing the best people who will excel in a startup. With a candidate retention rate of 90.3%, it is safe to say “We are the best in the game for startup hiring in Africa”.

We have worked with our partners to hire both for Technical and Non-Technical roles,  we have also helped them with expansion in Africa. Some of our clients include Bamboo, AAA Credit Limited, Vynt, FX Bridge, Shuttlers, Intron, LadderAfrica, Cadana, Fincra, Nordica Healthcare, Oval Finance, FortiFoods, Moniepoint, Sabi, etc.

Are you hiring at the moment? Contact us

Written and Edited By Damilola Koya