The shortage is usually in the process, not the market

When a role stays open for five months, the explanation offered is almost always the same: there is no talent available. In our experience running searches across Dar es Salaam, Arusha, Dodoma and the wider region, that is rarely the whole story. The candidates existed. They applied, waited, heard nothing, and took another offer. What failed was the process, and a process is something an employer can actually fix.

The job description was written for the organogram, not the candidate

Many advertised roles are internal job descriptions pasted into a job board: a list of duties, a demand for a degree, and a request for five to seven years of unspecified experience. It tells a strong candidate nothing about what they would achieve, who they would report to, or why the role exists. Write the advert around the outcomes expected in the first year, name the reporting line, and state the location and working pattern. Ambiguity filters out the confident applicants first — they have options and no patience for guesswork.

Nobody agreed what "good" looks like before the CVs arrived

If the hiring manager, the HR lead and the departmental head each hold a private definition of the ideal candidate, the shortlist becomes a negotiation rather than an assessment. Agree the selection criteria before the advert goes out. Four to six criteria is enough — the technical capability the role genuinely requires, the behaviours the team needs, and any non-negotiables such as licensing or willingness to travel. Everything else is a preference, and preferences should not eliminate anyone.

Interviews are unstructured, so they measure confidence

An unstructured interview is a conversation, and conversations reward the candidate who is most comfortable talking to senior people. That is a real skill for some roles and irrelevant for most. Structured interviewing means every candidate for a role gets the same core questions, in the same order, scored against the same criteria.

  • Ask about past behaviour rather than hypotheticals — what the candidate actually did, in what situation, with what result.
  • Score immediately after each interview, before discussing with colleagues. Scores contaminate each other quickly.
  • Use a simple scale with written anchors so a "4" means the same thing to everyone on the panel.
  • Let panel members disagree openly. A split score is information; a forced consensus is not.

Time-to-hire is treated as an administrative statistic

Time-to-hire is a competitiveness measure. A candidate who is good enough for your shortlist is on somebody else's shortlist too. Where processes stall, it is almost never the interviews themselves — it is the gaps between them: waiting for a panel member to return from leave, waiting for approval of a salary already in the budget, waiting for references nobody chased. Measure the gaps, not just the total. Set a service standard for how quickly a candidate hears back after each stage and hold the business to it.

References and background checks are done as a formality

A reference call that asks "would you rehire?" and stops there adds nothing. Ask the referee to describe the candidate's actual responsibilities, how they handled a difficult period, and where they needed support. Verify certificates and professional registrations directly with the issuing institution rather than accepting a photocopy. In a market where credential fraud is a live risk, this is basic diligence, and it protects the candidate pool too — genuine qualifications are worth less when nobody checks.

The offer is a surprise

Salary expectations should be discussed early, honestly and in both directions. An employer who conceals the band until the offer stage risks losing weeks on a candidate who was never going to accept. State a range in the advert or raise it in the first screening call. If the range is below market, that is a compensation problem to solve with the board — not a problem to discover at offer stage after four rounds of interviews.

Where to start if you are fixing one thing

Start with the scorecard. Agreeing in writing what you are assessing, before you see a single CV, improves every stage that follows: it sharpens the advert, structures the interview, and gives the panel a defensible basis for the decision. It costs an hour, and it is the single highest-return change most employers can make to how they hire.