Job description

About Shortlist

Welcome to Shortlist! We’re on a mission to mobilize and connect talent to impact, providing executive search and youth employment programming across Africa, India, and 20+ countries globally. Shortlist launched in 2015 in India and 2016 in Kenya, and to date we have worked with 700+ companies, engaged with over 1,500,000+ professionals, and made 3,000+ placements. 

We believe in the power of great teams to change the world, and have a significant focus on working with employers across the social impact and philanthropic sector, including dozens of leading social enterprises, NGOs, and foundations. We are also a values-driven culture, which you can read more about here, here and here.

We are growing quickly, and we’re now looking for exceptional leaders to grow our Talent Drives team, to be based in Nairobi, Kenya. We are currently seeking a Director, Talent for Climate & Clean Energy, to lead one or more programs to support green jobs programs across Africa and promote more gender equitable hiring practices in the clean energy sector.

Accelerating Talent & Jobs in Clean Energy

We are in the midst of a climate crisis, at the same time that there are still tens of millions across Africa that lack reliable access to energy. Front-line organizations (clean energy startups, climate NGOs, etc.) often cite hiring and talent challenges as their #1 constraint to growth and impact. This is compounded by the fact that women continue to be significantly under-represented across the clean energy value chain. 

Over the last three years, Shortlist has been leading work to identify and place high potential youth into clean energy jobs across Africa, and now we are looking to expand the program more broadly and in some new directions, possibly creating a new “Africa Climate Talent Center.” This cluster of programming and research aims to mobilize talent for the clean energy sector across Africa, create job opportunities and subsidized “work experiences” for youth, and ensure greater representation of women in labor value chains across the sector.

This position would lead multiple existing programs funded by major global donors (including UK Government, Carbon Trust, Dutch Government, Rockefeller Foundation, and the Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet), while also shaping, fundraising, and implementing a variety of new interventions across the range of talent needs in Africa.

Key Responsibilities

1. Entrepreneurial Leadership: Design and shape new programs and interventions, fundraise among existing funders and new partners, evangelize and educate stakeholders around the pressing need to address the talent gap in clean energy and the youth employment crisis in Africa, and generally build something game-changing from our current strong foundation.
2. Stakeholder and Funder Management: Ensure close collaboration and alignment with funders and other relevant stakeholders on program design and priorities, and provide thoughtful reporting and communication on status and achievements. This will include preparing data-driven and well-written reports with the program team.
3. Strategic Partnerships: Identifying, shaping and executing partnerships with a range of organizations around candidate sourcing and youth engagement, training and upskilling, program design, job placements, research, and advocacy. 
4.  Managing Complexity: Manage multiple internal and external relationships with employers, clients, and team to creatively address issues as they arise and execute to project timelines and deliverables. This will mean thinking creatively about how to deploy technology and team to achieve our impact targets in the most efficient way possible.
5. Team Leadership: Help build and lead a team of talent agents, community managers, coaches, and monitoring & evaluation specialists, along with problem solving and maintaining morale and motivation, to get the job done. 

Who you are…

• Background in consulting, project management, operations, or similar types of roles, ideally with significant exposure to and passion for clean energy and/or climate issues.
• Success in forging strategic partnerships to drive growth and program objectives.
• Strong preference for prior experience with education, upskilling, recruitment, job placement, or employability programs. 
• Experience managing senior-level external stakeholders,  which could include investors, strategic clients, or global donors.
• Track record of executing complex projects with resourcefulness, creativity and excellence.
• Comfortable building something from nothing, rallying people to a cause, pushing through barriers to get the job done. 
• Love for people management and developing teams to be their best.

Location

Nairobi (Kenya)

Interested? 

Learn more here: www.shortlist.net, or click apply to submit your application!