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Wave is a fintech company building financial services across Sub-Saharan Africa, with millions of users across 9 countries. The company is expanding into new markets and needs a deployable recruiter to lead hiring efforts in new launches.
In this role, you will be a mobile recruiter on Wave's expansion team, deployed to new markets approximately one month before launch and staying one to four months to establish the hiring foundation. You'll own full-cycle recruitment for the first cohort of hires, with emphasis on leadership and business-critical roles.
Key responsibilities include:
- Deploy into new markets and own hiring on the ground through critical early months
- Build talent maps from scratch: identify who exists in the market, where they work, compensation expectations, and which profiles need to be sourced externally
- Establish realistic compensation benchmarks in markets with limited salary data
- Own full-cycle recruitment weighted toward leadership and business-critical roles
- Cover the People function gap before permanent People Ops arrives, including onboarding and practicalities
- Hire and hand over to your replacement, ensuring their success
- Maintain Greenhouse data integrity and pipeline health across deployments
- Carry Wave's hiring bar into new markets and be the credible face of Wave to senior candidates
- Capture learnings from each launch to improve subsequent market entries
You'll be hired locally on a local contract in one of Wave's operating countries (Senegal, Côte d'Ivoire, Mali, Burkina Faso, The Gambia, Uganda, Niger, Sierra Leone, or Cameroon) as your home base. Expect to spend the majority of the year deployed outside your home country. Deployments are fully supported with travel, accommodation, and assignment allowance. Work authorization in one operating country is required; Wave handles visas and permits for deployments.
Requirements:
- 6+ years owning end-to-end recruitment
- 3+ years of in-house recruiting in Africa in high-growth or scaling environments
- Full professional fluency in French and English, including negotiating compensation and handling difficult conversations in both languages
- Experience recruiting in unfamiliar markets where you built the talent map yourself rather than leveraging existing networks
- Strong experience hiring for both field and office roles
- Right to work in one of Wave's operating countries with a passport and personal circumstances allowing short-notice continental movement
- Genuine willingness and ability to live and work away from home for months at a time, repeatedly
- Excellent stakeholder management and ability to earn credibility quickly with new country leadership
- Strong analytical mindset, comfortable with metrics, KPIs, and spreadsheets
- High autonomy in ambiguous conditions, often as the only recruiter in-country
