Isaac Adewumi built a newsletter to name what Nigerian workplaces will not. Here is what he found.
Isaac Adewumi did not plan to start a newsletter. He is a content and sales conversion writer — someone who helps companies find the right words for the right audiences. But in January, a social media post stopped him cold.
A recruiter had gone viral. She claimed to have reviewed about 5,000 applications for a virtual assistant role without finding a single suitable candidate, and concluded, in so many words, that Nigerians were scammers. Adewumi replied. The resonance surprised him.
“I realized that a lot of people resonated with it,” he said. “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.”
That silence became the premise of The HR Decoded, a newsletter Adewumi now runs alongside his work at XSITE Capital. Each edition pulls a thread from Nigeria’s hiring and workplace fabric — discrimination, salary manipulation, toxic management, employee burnout — and holds it up to the light. He said the goal is simple: “to have conversations with everybody within the workspace on how to create a space that is healthy and doesn’t feel like a prison.”
The Power Problem
When Adewumi talks about communication failures in Nigerian hiring, he traces them back to something older and deeper than HR policy. It is, he argued, a power problem.
“This comes from the power relationship within most Nigerian dynamics — more or less a master-slave relationship,” he said. “Whenever there’s a power dynamic there tends to be an abuse of it.”
The symptoms show up at every stage of the hiring process. Candidates receive no confirmation that their applications arrived. Interviewers schedule calls without offering alternative time slots. Candidates feel they cannot ask to reschedule and rarely hear back either way.
“Within the Nigerian space, it’s almost unheard of for you to ask if the conversation can be rescheduled,” Adewumi said.
Negotiation fares no better. Adewumi observed that many candidates do not know they are entitled to negotiate — salary, benefits, compensation structure — and that recruiters rarely tell them they can. The unspoken rule, he said, is that you take what you are given and consider yourself fortunate.
He reserved particular frustration for the gap between stated company values and hiring behaviour. One of the most reliable tests of a company’s character, he argued, is how it treats people at the door.
“If honesty is part of your values as a brand, we should not see things like ‘We do not hire Igbo or Yoruba people’ in the job application of an organisation that has honesty and indiscrimination as part of their values,” he said. “The values are not reflected in the workplace and hiring process. It is just words on the wall.”
Failing People
For Adewumi, the question of where HR is failing has one answer, plainly stated: people.
“We are failing people, and I don’t think we truly understand the impact of failing people,” he said. “People are not just people; they’re part of families and families are part of societies.”
He pointed to a story he had recently covered in the newsletter — one that illustrated the stakes with clinical precision. Two employees at a Nigerian startup were clinically diagnosed with depression. The cause, over months, was the words of their team lead.
“Imagine the impact of that on their families, on the religious bodies where they are, and on the healthcare system,” Adewumi said. “Just one person’s action led to their loss of income, time spent in the hospital, drugs, care, and emotional stress.”
The ripple effect of a single toxic manager, he argued, extends far beyond the office. Accountability, in his view, is not a compliance checkbox. It is a practice of basic human dignity — treating people the way you want to be treated.
The Money Silence
On pay transparency, Adewumi looked beyond HR departments and companies to something structural. The problem, he said, begins in culture.
“Within African society we do not talk about money or how to make money,” he said. “We don’t talk about things like taxes, debt, wealth, appreciation, evaluation, inflation.”
That silence enters the workplace fully formed. Employees who have never been taught to discuss money openly find themselves unable to name what they need or argue for what they deserve. Recruiters, operating in the same culture, do not create conditions for the conversation to happen either.
Adewumi acknowledged the cycle is not easy to break but said he believes change will require leaders to act first. He spoke about eventually publishing his own salary publicly, alongside those of his employees, and breaking down openly how money is made and spent in his organisation.
“This is a deeper issue that goes beyond the workspace,” he said, “and change would require a radical style of thinking.”
What Startups Get Wrong
Adewumi spent time as an operator in the startup ecosystem before his current role, and the experience left marks. He described founders who could not meet payroll but did not tell their staff, who took the stress of cashflow pressure out on their teams, and who fired employees without notice and without specifying when final pay would arrive.
On one project, he borrowed N240,000 from a friend to pay six operators when the founder could not.
“Workers plan their lives around their payments,” he said.
Beyond financial dishonesty, he identified two other patterns that fuel burnout. The first is the expectation that employees are always available — that the workweek does not truly end on Friday, that a boss may call on Saturday, and that a person’s twenties should be entirely consumed by professional output.
The second is what he called “horrible middle managers and top managers” — people whose presence diminishes rather than develops those around them.
He also named favoritism, the inaccessibility of founders, and toxic office politics as contributors to environments where people do not stay or, worse, where people break.
What HR Can Actually Do
Adewumi was careful not to overstate what HR departments can accomplish without the cooperation of founders. Culture, he said, does not begin with HR — it begins with whoever leads the organisation.
“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,” he said.
That said, he outlined concrete steps HR teams can take within their reach: strong reporting and feedback systems that allow performance to be genuinely assessed, performance reviews taken seriously rather than treated as formalities, and a direct line from HR to every employee — not filtered through managers.
He also placed weight on onboarding: new employees should receive all the information and support they need from the beginning, not discovering the rules as they violate them.
“The storytelling has to start from the founders,” he said. “And more than the storytelling, practical living has to start from them. Otherwise, it is all a joke.”
Isaac Adewumi writes The HR Decoded, a newsletter exploring Nigeria’s hiring and workplace systems. He is also the creator of Conversion Copy at XSITE Capital.
