Zambian Job Hunter, the newest job portal app in town

With unemployment levels in Zambia ever on the rise, it’s great to have resources that connect job seekers to new opportunities, and I just discovered a new app doing this called Zambian Job Hunter, in the Google Play Store. Here is the interview I had with its creator Pride Kavumba:

What is Zambian Job Hunter and what are its benefits?

Zambian Job Hunter is an application that helps job seekers find the latest job opportunities.

Benefits

1. It is cheaper to run than visiting a website. It updates new jobs at less than 0.002 kwacha (average from the tests that were carried out over a month on the MTN network).
2. It notifies the user whenever there are new jobs.

Who created the app and when?

The app was created by Pride Kavumba from January to August 2015.

Is it only available on Android or does it have other platforms?

It is only available on Android. It will be available for BlackBerry and iPhone soon.

Where do you source the job listings?

The job listings are fetched from company websites online.

Can users post their own job listings?

At the moment, users can’t post their own jobs. The facility will be included in subsequent updates of Zambian Job Hunter.

It shows you can access the app offline, does it really store the information without prompting to connect to the server at all?

It saves the jobs when someone opens the app and loads new jobs. That means the last viewed jobs will be saved and can be accessed any time without needing an internet connection. As a result when it is opened offline it will show the following title: Last Viewed Jobs  which users can click on to see their saved jobs.

Why did you feel the need to create the app?

It all start in January this year (2015) when I was looking for a new job in an IT and telecoms company. I was buying at least a 10MB data bundle so that I could check the Airtel, MTN, Zamtel and other job portal websites for new Jobs in IT and telecoms. Most of the times I would find no job postings which meant I wasted my money on the bundle. I then started checking once a week on Thursdays. This also wasn’t very helpful as I could miss a lot of job opportunities. It wasn’t long before I realized this process was very expensive and laborious for me.

That’s when I started working on an app that could do all the searching for me and notify me when new job opportunities are available and at a minimal cost. In March I had an app that could help me according to my requirements; low cost and keep me notified when new job opportunities are available effortless.

However, I realized that most of the people looking for jobs could be facing the same problems I was facing. So I decided to help others as well. That’s how I expanded the scope of jobs and called the app Zambian Job Hunter.

I put the app on play store for free so that anyyone can access job opportunities. I am currently working on delivering newspaper job ads also in the palm of the app users hands. I hope to publish an update before the 25th September 2015.

How is it better than other existing job portals at the moment?

It is very cheap to run. It uses less than 0.001 Kwacha (average from the tests that were carried out over a month on MTN network) of airtime to check if new job opportunities are available and it only checks for them 3 times in a day. It uses less than 0.002 Kwacha to fetch the new jobs opportunities.

If the app is open and the user tries to refresh the page it won’t waste airtime/data bundle to fetch the jobs if there is nothing new.

Zambian Job Hunter was built to notify the user when new job opportunities are available in the field they are interested in. The jobs have been split into categories to help the search much easier for job seekers. The notifications can be turned off in the app settings if someone doesn’t want to be notified.

You can download the Zambian Job Hunter app here for Android. It needs 2.8 MB of space and requires Android 2.3 and later.