When people think of HR, they think of a department that is there to further the company’s interests. “HR is not your friend,” employees claim. But for Abraham Iyiola, this was the very problem he needed to solve.
After leading recruitment at Jumia and seeing the disconnect between companies and their employees firsthand, he became obsessed with a simple, radical idea: what if a recruitment firm acted, not as a corporate gatekeeper, but as a genuine friend to the job seeker? He started by doing favours for friends, helping them fill roles in their companies.
From those accidental beginnings, he built CareerBuddy – a company that would rather walk away from a paying client than place a candidate in a toxic work situation, and one that has chosen to bootstrap its way in the market to prove that in the business of people, values can be a sustainable competitive advantage.
Day 1: The accidental company
Abraham Iyiola was burnt out and didn’t want to be a recruiter anymore. After two years as Head of Recruiting at Jumia, where he hired over 1,200 people, he was done. He had seen the disconnect firsthand: the way the company casually spoke about firing staff, the employees just going through the motions. He wanted a break, so he left.
The idea for CareerBuddy seeded around the time; a company that would be a “friend” to job seekers, balancing the scales in a system that often favoured the employer, but he was “dilly-dallying.” He thought, “I need more research, I need to understand the market,” and even took another job.
Then, the first client came. Not through a pitch, but a favour. A friend from his Jumia days, Anu, founder of Sabi Africa, was building Rensource Energy at the time and needed to hire. “Look, you’re the best recruiter I know. I need people that I can trust,” she told him. His response was, “I’m not really interested in that.”
She insisted, offering to provide whatever resources he needed to make the hire.
So, he went in search of the hire the company needed. “It started like her and a few other people just saying, ‘Can you help me find someone? Can you help me find someone?’” Iyiola recalls. There was no business plan, no grand launch. Just a founder, his network, and a growing pile of requests from friends who refused to let his talent go to waste.
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Days 10-500: Referrals and a reality check
In the beginning, the “company” was just Iyiola, operating on the side. He’d connect people he knew from his Jumia network with the founders who were now asking for his help. The first placement was a senior customer operations executive for Rensource Energy. “I’m not even sure that counts as day one,” he says, “because it was like I’m doing it for a friend.”
But a pattern emerged. “People started coming based on referrals and word of mouth.” The demand became undeniable. He was getting “swamped.” The turning point from side hustle to real company was the day he hired his first employee, someone who knew nothing about recruiting, trained from scratch, just to manage the inflow.
This organic, referral-only growth was validating. “We never had a period where we felt like, okay it wasn’t going to work, because the moment I was clear that we want[ed] to do this… it became a life mission,” Iyiola says. Feedback from placed candidates cemented the feeling that CareerBuddy was a company the world needed.
But the grind of bootstrapping brought a stark moment of truth. There was a period when “clients didn’t pay us on time,” Iyiola says. The financial pressure mounted, threatening the company’s survival. In a move that defies the typical startup narrative, it was a client, not an investor, who intervened.
“One of our clients literally said, ‘You know what? How much do you need to survive for the next six months? I’m going to give you that,’” Iyiola recounts. The client proposed deducting the advance from future recruitment fees. For Iyiola, this was the ultimate proof of concept. “That’s when I knew personally, okay, this is a thing that needs to be done, and I need to continue to make sure it gets done no matter what.”
Days 500-1000: Crystallising the ‘Anti-HR’ ethos
With survival assured, CareerBuddy’s culture hardened into its core differentiator. Iyiola made an intentional, defining choice: they would not raise venture capital. “I personally wanted to have control over the people that we hire, how we build the company culture,” he states. They wanted to prove the business could thrive on the value it delivered alone.
This independence allowed them to fully embrace their identity as the “anti-HR” HR firm. Their North Star became the candidate experience, even when it hurt the bottom line. “If we are dealing with a client and a candidate and we know the client is treating the candidate badly, we take the side of the candidate even though we’re going to lose money,” Iyiola says. They built systems for “over-communication,” ensuring no candidate was left in the dark, and began vetting clients, walking away from companies with toxic cultures.
This philosophy was tested when a founder wanted to fire a new hire whom Iyiola had placed. Instead of accepting the loss, CareerBuddy intervened. “We sat with the candidate to work out a plan… and we then told the founder, ‘Look, this person is good, they’re having some challenge adjusting to the pace.’” They created a performance plan, the employee succeeded, and stayed with the company long-term. For Iyiola, this was the human-centric approach in action, the core of their work that no algorithm could ever replace.
Image Source: CareerBuddy
Day 1000+
Looking back, Iyiola sees a personal transformation. A self-professed short-term thinker who “get(s) bored easily,” he has found a life’s work in CareerBuddy’s “persistent problems.” His vision is no longer short-term. He thinks in generations. “I’m going to probably build it and hand it over to my children, or it’s going to be something that exists in 100 years from here.”
His advice to his Day 1 self is a lesson in overcoming his own humility. He admits to being “media-shy,” holding onto an old belief that “when you make something good, you don’t have to advertise it.” He now sees that was a limitation. “In the beginning, if we had shared a bit more of what we do, we probably would have gotten even a lot bigger traction.”
Armed with that hard-won wisdom and a business built on unshakable values, CareerBuddy’s ambition is clear: to become the first platform Africans think of when they want a job that doesn’t make them dread Monday morning.
It’s a simple, radical goal, born from the accidental beginnings of a founder who just wanted to do a few favours for his friends.
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