Recruiting Is the Easy Part

Rwanda's NST2 strategy targets 1.25 million productive jobs by 2029 — roughly 250,000 a year. The country is moving: 10% growth in Q1 2026, close to $8 billion in private investment commitments announced to Parliament since 2024, expected to create around 118,000 jobs. And yet unemployment held steady at 13.4% in May — 15.7% among youth, 15.5% among women.

Creating positions isn't enough. I see it directly, across the organizations I work with in Kigali: hiring is never the actual problem. The real problem is what happens between the day an offer is accepted and the day that person is genuinely autonomous.

The wrong diagnosis

When a team grows fast, the natural instinct is to look at recruiting first — the role, the job description, the interviews, the offer. It's the visible part, the one leaders know how to manage, so it gets all the attention. The real bottleneck sits elsewhere, and I keep seeing it take three different shapes.

First case: vision is missing before the role even exists. The math is simple: ChatGPT launched in late 2022, and it took just one year for everyday consumer use to go mainstream — 100 million weekly active users worldwide by November 2023. But that mass adoption wasn't primarily professional: in 2025, the single most common individual use of generative AI worldwide was emotional support and companionship, 31% of usage versus 17% a year earlier, far ahead of help writing code, according to Harvard Business Review. Nearly four years after ChatGPT launched, with tools whose power is no longer in question, I still regularly see organizations in Kigali doing nothing concrete with it professionally — the gap between massive personal use and structured professional use never closes. The reflex is to hire: the position is open, the budget is there — but nobody has defined what that's supposed to actually change in teams' day-to-day work. The person arrives, stacks up tools, and nothing really shifts in operations. The new hire's technical skills are almost never the issue. What's missing is a clear definition of the expected impact, upstream of the hire itself.

Second case: urgency crushes onboarding. Activity spikes, and the business needs to professionalize fast — this pattern shows up in most hires made under pressure. In the hires I work on, the gap is stark: with a prepared onboarding, someone becomes autonomous in their role within a week; without preparation, it takes a month — sometimes longer. Leadership and managers still expect that person to be operational almost immediately, forgetting one simple fact: they have zero history with the company and no understanding of its ecosystem yet. The business expects a fast result; the new hire, skilled as they are, carries the stress of delivering with no bearings, alone. The hire itself was right. The timeline wasn't — nobody left room to learn the company before judging the result.

A third case, quieter: a vacant role or a planned departure comes down mostly to the company's memory, not onboarding as such. A departing employee often neglects their handover unless their manager actively frames it, and the replacement inherits approximate information they spend weeks reconstructing, instead of finding it written down.

Three different causes. One shared symptom: a team growing or turning over without anyone documenting how it actually works.

The real cost

This cost rarely shows up on a budget line, which is exactly why it goes unaddressed. It's paid in early turnover, in errors that a written process would have prevented, in managers stuck re-explaining the same basics instead of leading. And it's paid in frustration on both sides — the business expecting an immediate result, the new hire discovering the role with no safety net.

What minimal structure changes

None of this needs a bureaucratic overhaul. Three elements are usually enough, regardless of company size.

For the job description, one question is enough to filter out hires that weren't ready: before posting it, write one sentence — "in six months, what will this person have changed in our operations?" If you can't complete it, the role isn't ready to be posted yet. This is exactly what's missing from most AI-related roles opened without a clear vision.

A written onboarding path, next: what the person needs to know about the company's ecosystem before being judged on results, with a real check-in at 30, 60, and 90 days to look together at what's landed and what's stuck. It replaces the implicit expectation of "be operational immediately" with a realistic path.

A handover run by the manager, not left to the departing employee's initiative. As soon as a departure is announced, list together what a replacement can't reconstruct alone — key contacts, open files, deadlines, known pitfalls — and block dedicated time before the last day to write it down.

The common thread: documenting one person's work — and more broadly, the company's activities as a whole — guarantees continuity, no matter who's behind the desk, newly arrived or not. That's not red tape.

The takeaway

Rwanda is creating jobs faster than it's reducing unemployment, and that gap isn't just a macroeconomic story — it plays out inside every growing organization. Recruiting is the easy part. What separates teams that absorb growth from teams that exhaust themselves hiring on repeat is what got prepared before the person arrived, and what gets documented once they're there.

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If your team is growing faster than your processes can keep up, let's talk for 30 minutes. No pitch — just a conversation.