What do global companies often get wrong when hiring in Africa? They assume the hiring playbook that worked in London, Dubai, or Singapore will work in Lagos, Nairobi, or Johannesburg. It usually doesn’t.
Having worked closely with businesses hiring across African markets, I’ve seen how easy it is to over-index on the CV. Big multinational. Right qualification. International experience. All useful signals — but none of them guarantee that someone will succeed in the specific market they’re being hired for.
Why the CV Isn’t Enough
Operating in Africa often requires a different kind of resilience than operating in a mature, established market. You need people who can make decisions with imperfect information, build relationships quickly, and get things done when the environment doesn’t always cooperate.
Candidates from large organisations in mature markets usually operate inside a structure someone else already built: established processes, reliable infrastructure, predictable regulatory environments. In many African markets, that structure still needs to be built by the person you’re hiring not simply operated within. That’s a fundamentally different skill from executing well inside an existing system, and a CV rarely tells you which of the two a candidate has actually done.
Africa Is Not One Market
The second mistake is treating Africa as a single, interchangeable market. Nigeria is not Kenya. Kenya is not South Africa. The talent pools, business cultures, and leadership challenges differ substantially from one market to the next and so does the basic structure of how business gets done.
The retail sector illustrates this well. South Africa’s modern retail channel accounts for over 60% of the market, a level of formalisation closer to a developed economy. In Nigeria, by contrast, an estimated 97% of retail transactions still run through traditional, informal channels. Kenya sits somewhere in between, with modern trade estimated at roughly 20–30% of grocery sales and growing quickly. Three countries, three fundamentally different operating realities — and a leader who thrives navigating one of them won’t automatically thrive in another.
This is also why placing someone into an unfamiliar operating environment carries real risk when the fit isn’t right. Research on international assignments estimates failure rates of 25–40% in developed-market placements. This rises toward 70% in markets that are significantly less familiar to the person being placed. However precisely that range holds in any given case, the direction is consistent with what we see in practice: market fit predicts success more reliably than pedigree does.
What Actually Predicts Success
The best hire is therefore not necessarily the person with the most impressive CV. It’s the person whose experience, judgement, and temperament fit the reality of the specific market they’re being hired into.
And that doesn’t mean choosing between local and international talent as though it’s a binary. Often, the strongest leaders combine local market understanding with international exposure. They have enough grounding in how the market actually works to move fast and build relationships. They also have enough exposure to more structured environments to bring discipline and rigour where it’s needed. Finding and evaluating for that combination, rather than defaulting to whichever CV looks most impressive on paper is where good executive hiring makes the difference.
Select Global Solutions places senior leaders across Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia, with the market-specific context to evaluate who will actually succeed in a given operating environment — not just who looks strongest on paper. Get in touch for a confidential conversation.
