Isaac Adewumi is a content and sales conversion writer at XSITE Capital with over six years of experience working with SaaS brands, founders, and digital creators on customer engagement and retention. He is also the creator of The HR Decoded, a newsletter that explores the realities of Nigeria’s hiring and workplace systems through conversations on issues such as hiring discrimination, salary manipulation, toxic workplace culture, and employee wellbeing. In this interview with The HR Anchor, Adewumi speaks on the challenges within Nigeria’s HR and hiring landscape, workplace accountability, startup culture, and the reforms needed to build healthier work environments.
What inspired the launch of The HR Decoded in January?
Isaac Adewumi: I had no plans to start a newsletter as of this point last year. I like to keep my personal opinions, which some have called controversial, away from social media. But there was a very popular post by a lady, where she said she went through about 5,000 applications and could not find one person for a virtual assistant role. In the post she went on to say, basically the summary was that Nigerians are scammers. I got so enraged. I was angry at that post, and I replied. I realized that a lot of people resonated with it. I also realized that there is a lot of ambiguity, lack of clarity, and confusion about what is right or wrong within the hiring system. More importantly there is a lot of silence, so I wrote a lot about those things and a lot of people started sharing their stories. And it just went from there. The idea of the newsletter was to have conversations with everybody within the workspace on how to create a space that is healthy and does not feel like a prison.
The newsletter tackles uncomfortable issues like discrimination and salary manipulation. From your conversations so far, what would you say are the most deeply entrenched problems in Nigeria’s hiring system that HR leaders are still not confronting honestly?
Isaac Adewumi: The list is long. But the first one is communication. It is a deeper problem within the Nigerian society, but you also see it a lot in the hiring space. This comes from the power relationship within most Nigerian dynamics— more or less a master-slave relationship. Whenever there is a power dynamic there tends to be an abuse of it. And you also find it in the workplace where the hiring team almost feels like they are doing the job candidate a favor. So, they think ‘why should I communicate with you like I would to someone who is a colleague.’ So, there is a complete lack of communication, and this is expressed in many ways. For example, when you apply to a role there is almost no feedback whether or not your CV was received. When you are asked to get on a call, there are no multiple time slots for you from which to choose your interview time. When you get on the call no one asks you if this is a good time to talk. Within the Nigerian space, it is almost unheard of for you to ask if the conversation can be rescheduled. So that is the first problem. The second one is that when it comes to negotiations, there is the idea that you should take whatever you are given. Well, this can be more of a candidate issue, and I feel like it is because of the practice that we have here. When you negotiate for what you want or say you cannot accept certain terms, you are seen as the weird one. A lot of job candidates do not know they are supposed to negotiate every single thing — the composition plan and other benefits. And the recruiter or the hiring manager does not even tell you about your right to negotiate. The other thing I also notice is the value systems. One of the easiest ways to test a company’s values is in how they bring in new people through the door. For all the great values that a lot of Nigerian companies say they have, we do not see it in their hiring process. If honesty is part of your values as a brand, we should not see things like ‘We don’t hire Igbo or Yoruba people’ in the job application of an organization that has honesty and indiscrimination as part of their values. The values are not reflected in the workplace and hiring process. It is just words on the wall.
In your view, where exactly is HR failing, and what should accountability look like within HR departments?
Isaac Adewumi: The very simple answer to that is people. We are failing people, and do not think we truly understand the impact of failing people. People are not just people; they are part of families and families are part of societies. That young man in his 20s or 30s that is working at the office is a boyfriend, brother, husband, and father. That young woman is connected to society as a mother, a sister, a wife, a girlfriend, a single woman. So, every single interaction they have with a hiring manager or a recruiter affects them in some sort of way. The biggest area of improvement that we are failing at is in the way we treat people. The way we treat people reflects in everything. For example, the last newsletter I wrote was based on a conversation I had with someone who said two employees of a startup literally ran mad. The workers were clinically diagnosed with depression because of the words over a period of months from their team lead. Now imagine the impact of that on their families, on the religious bodies where they are, and on the healthcare system. Do you see the multiple scale effects of not treating people right across different parts of society? Just one person’s action led to their loss of income, time spent in the hospital, drugs, care, and emotional stress. Accountability should look like treating people the way we want to be treated.
Salary manipulation is a recurring theme in your conversations. Why do you think transparency around pay is still so limited in Nigeria, and what practical steps can organisations take to build fair and structured compensation systems?
Isaac Adewumi: I think the lack of transparency has to do with the larger culture. Within African society we do not talk about money or how to make money. We talk about it as a tool to make the community better, but we never talk about how to make it. We do not talk about things like taxes, debt, wealth, appreciation, evaluation, inflation. (14:53) The reason pay is not transparent is because within the secular system, we do not talk about money. If we had those conversations, when you get into the workspace you can completely say this is the amount of money I want to earn based on the effort I am putting into the work. I do not think this is just a problem caused by an organization as I think it is an individual thing. Eventually down the line, people like me, who are building organizations, would eventually have to change the practice by publicly putting out our own salaries as leaders, publicly putting out the salaries of employees, and break down how money is made and how it is being spent. This is because this is a deeper issue that goes beyond the workspace, and change would require a radical style of thinking.
From your experience working with startups and growth-stage companies, are Nigerian organisations more focused on attracting talent than retaining it? What are the biggest mistakes companies make when it comes to keeping employees?
Isaac Adewumi: Absolutely. A lot of companies are more focused on attracting than retaining. I think the first one of the biggest mistakes they make is honesty. A lot of Nigerian startups have short runways, or the money is not flowing as it should. But where it gets crazy is when the founder that cannot pay salaries does not tell you that he or she cannot pay salaries and owes you for weeks and days. Then when you ask them about it, they get angry. Or when the pressure of money gets to them and they come into a meeting and emotionally abuse their staff. Or fire staff without reason, without notice, and do not tell you when you will receive your first pay. Again, the biggest mistake, in my opinion, is a lack of honesty. And I have experienced this because I have also worked as an operator within the startup space. There was a particular incident where we worked on a project and when payday was approaching, they said the money to pay us was not available yet. I had to borrow N240,000 from a friend to pay six of the operators that worked on that project. Workers plan their lives around their payments. So, a lack of honesty, a lack of welfare, not treating your staff like human beings, emotional abuse, and unreasonable KPIs. The list is endless.
As a content and conversion writer, you help companies shape messaging that drives engagement. How can HR teams better use storytelling and communication to build trust with employees and candidates beyond just polished employer branding?
Isaac Adewumi: It begins from the founder or the direct head of the organization. What you are trying to sell as a HR professional is the culture of an organization. That is the product that you are trying to sell. And to be fair, culture does not begin from the HR manager, it begins from the founder. Whatever the founder says is law is law, regardless of what beautiful values are written on the mugs and the notebooks that are given to staff. The values, the culture, what works, what does not work begins with the founding team. So, they are the ones who have to fix up. The storytelling has to start from them. And more than the storytelling, practical living has to start from them. Otherwise, it is all a joke.
You have highlighted toxic startup environments in your newsletter. What patterns have you observed in Nigerian startups that contribute to burnout or exploitation?
Isaac Adewumi: We must first understand the importance of treating people like humans. And we have to understand the environment that we are operating in. As much as we want the best and want employees to hit 10,000 leads, talk to a million people, and set up the highest KPIs in the world for them — we must understand that these are people living in Nigeria, which is a peculiar country. One of the things that I have seen contribute to burnout and exploitation is the toxic idea that people are supposed to work Mondays to Fridays at the office but still continue thinking about work from Fridays to Mondays. There is no room to unplug, and your boss can call you on a Saturday. They expect that your twenties should be all about work and more work. The second one is what I call horrible middle managers and top managers. These are people who, when you are in their presence and you talk about what you are working on, they make you feel less of you are. Colleagues, workspaces, and especially management. Places where you have a top performer or employee who is doing the work, and someone else is dragging them back. Organizations that encourage toxic work culture, where you cannot walk into the founder’s office and have a conversation with him or her. For example, I saw something on the internet where access to the founder was seen as a peck. I do not understand what this means because as an early-stage startup, what in the name of God is access to a founder? Another thing is the issue of favoritism where company laws are not applied across board and office politics becomes toxic. Office politics is everywhere, but the point where laws are being bent for somebody against another person makes the workplace toxic.
How can HR systems evolve to protect employees in these spaces?
Isaac Adewumi: There is nothing HR managers can do if the founding team are not willing to abide by whatever the HR creates or sets in place for the organization. But besides that, there has to be strong reporting and feedback systems. Such that we can actually test whether an employee is productive or not. And also, performance reviews have to be taken seriously. The HR manager should have a direct line to every employee beyond the conversations that are being had with their manager. This is so that they are able to actually verify every single piece of information. During the onboarding process, new employees should be equipped with all the important information to make their job easier and be given all the support they need to excel.
