Why HirePadi exists
Nigeria produces about 1.7 million graduates every year. A 2025 analysis of over 200,000 graduate applications found that just 1% made it to an interview. The problem isn't a shortage of talent — it's that most people are applying the wrong way, to the wrong roles, with the wrong materials.
The standard job search in Nigeria looks like this: open Jobberman, scroll for an hour, apply to ten things with the same CV you've been using for two years, then wait in silence. Most applications go nowhere, and you rarely find out why. Meanwhile the roles that were actually a good fit — on a different board, posted three days ago — you never saw.
HirePadi was built to fix that loop. Upload your CV once. We pull jobs from eight-plus sources — Adzuna, MyJobMag, Jooble, Reed, JSearch, Remotive, Jobicy, and more — match each one against your profile using AI, and show you a score out of 100 before you decide whether to apply. When you find a role worth pursuing, we tailor your CV to it in under 90 seconds, generate a cover letter, and draft a LinkedIn message to the hiring team. Then we track everything in a pipeline and monitor your Gmail for recruiter replies so nothing falls through the cracks.
The tools that exist for this in the US and UK are good. They've never been built for Nigeria specifically — the sources, the salary context, the ATS conventions at Nigerian banks and telcos, the reality of the informal sector. We built this one from the ground up for the Nigerian market, with naira pricing and a product that reflects how hiring actually works here.
The people behind it
HirePadi was founded by Gbemi, a software engineer who got tired of watching talented Nigerian professionals lose out on opportunities because the tools available to them were built for a different market. The platform launched in 2024 and has been growing through word of mouth from job seekers who found it genuinely useful.
We're a small, Nigeria-focused team. We don't have a VC-backed growth story to tell — just a product that works and a community of job seekers who've gotten interviews, offers, and roles they care about.
What we believe
Nigerian talent is not the problem. The infrastructure around job search is. Most job seekers don't know where they stand against the roles they're applying to, don't have time to tailor every application manually, and don't have visibility into what happens after they apply. We think that information asymmetry is fixable with the right tools — and that the people who benefit most are the ones the existing platforms have historically underserved.
We also think AI job search should be honest. A match score of 45 is as useful as a score of 90 — it tells you something true about where you stand. We don't inflate scores to make users feel good. We'd rather show you where the gaps are so you can close them than pretend everything looks great and wonder why the interviews aren't coming.
What's next
We're expanding source coverage, improving match accuracy, and building features for Nigerian professionals applying to international remote roles — a segment that's been growing fast and getting underserved by tools that don't understand what international hiring managers need to see on a Nigerian candidate's CV.
If you've found HirePadi useful and want to share feedback, tell us what you'd change, or just say hello — we read every email.