Who is Joseph?
Only a positive mindset with an enterprising spirit can tackle the deep entrenched challenge of underdevelopment Entrepreneurial wisdom, in its very essence, embodies some exceptional qualities like initiative, innovation, a risk-taking attitude, and a proactive mindset. When an individual harnesses such attributes, it leads to an impeccable transformation of the socio-economic fabric of their regions, professions, or any of their spheres of influence.
This life force, which must be nurtured, fostered, encouraged and supported, is the only potential force that can genuinely empower and uplift other individuals and societies not only in their immediate environments but on an entire continent. It is this philosophy that Joseph Mathenge Mathenge subscribed to since he joined MOI University, Kenya, in 1988 to pursue his bachelor’s degree in arts, management and technology. He obtained a master’s degree in business administration in 2003, broadening his view of the HR profession and entrepreneurship as drivers of genuine change and transformation.
Professionally, Joseph Mathenge is a Certified Public Secretary (CPS) and a Certified Remuneration Analyst (JCA) and a practicing member of the Institute of Human Resource Management (IHRM) Kenya.
His HR Career Path
Joseph Mathenge started his career journey at Kenya School of professional studies as a business and management tutor and later became the head of business studies where he helped the school to expand its business school through new market driven courses. His HR journey started at Kenya Power and Lighting Company [KPLC] where he began as a Recruitment Officer working his way up the corporate ladder to the position of Chief Human Resource Officer, Training.
He later fills senior HR Leadership Positions as General Manager, Human Resource at Sarova Hotels and Kenya Civil Aviation Authority.
Leading Career Options Africa Group to the Pole Position in Africa’s HR landscape
In 2006, Joseph Mathenge established Career Options Africa as a startup sole proprietor training firm working with reputable global speakers to organize international conferences in East Africa on various business are in Marketing, Corporate Leadership, Risk Management etc. Joseph Mathenge later added HR consultancy to the business line and became one of the most respected Job Evaluation and Reward Management Consultants in East Africa, designing remuneration structures aligned to the business strategy for many clients in public and private sectors across different industries.
Career Options Africa (Kenya) ltd was registered in 2015 taking over the sole proprietor business with a new focus on Human Resource Outsourcing and recruitment, quickly becoming the go to HR agency for international companies seeking employer of records (EOR) service in Kenya. The need by international companies to have one EOR partner within the East Africa region led to the birth of Career Options Africa Group in 2015 with the registration of Career Options Africa (Tanzania) Ltd followed shortly after with registration of similar entities in Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi and South Sudan.
As more global companies sought support in other regions of Africa, the need to expand to west, north and south Africa arose hence the registration of Career Options Africa in Nigeria and South Africa in 2013 and 2014 respectively. Besides these own entities, Career Options Africa group serves clients in twelve other African countries through partnerships with smaller local agencies, bringing their reach in Africa to nineteen countries.
With this expansion, what began as a small sole proprietor business in 2006 has grown to become one of the largest HR agencies under Joseph’s stewardship. Besides the geographical expansion of the HR outsourcing business, the group has diversified into other interlinked areas of HR including recruitment, immigration support and Labour export and is today one of the leading exporters of skilled and semi-skilled skills from Africa to middle east, Europe and Canada.
Employer of records (EOR) is the flagship service for the group and targeted at international companies and non-profit organizations with business in Africa with no own local entity. These global organizations lack the legal capacity to hire employees, hence need an umbrella employer to contract the employees, process their salaries and pay applicable statutory deductions and contributions applicable under local Labour and tax laws.
It is this void that Career Options Africa group fills by being the legal employer and bearing all employer risks on behalf of the internal clients. This enables the global employers to be compliant with local labour and tax laws without the need to invest capital in local branches nor having to hire HR and Finance professionals for their Africa operations. This provides a faster and much more viable expansion route to global companies in Africa. Besides the capital saved, it removes the handles of compliance risks by having a local partner who is conversant with the local business environment including laws, regulations and cultures.
Besides EOR, Career Options Africa group has the expertise to offer all forms of HR outsourcing services including Labour management, staff management and the most complex HR outsourcing model of professional employer organization (PEO). All these levels of HR outsourcing are supported by well-trained recruitment, payroll and immigration professionals.
Being a facilitator of global companies in Africa, it is not surprising that Joseph Mathenge manages one of the largest pool of expatriates in Africa as his global clientele relies heavily on home trained managers to lead their expansion projects in Africa. The group is one of the largest employers of expatriate staff in Africa processing hundreds of visas, work permits and resident passes at any one time in several of the countries of operation.
To supply these clients with the required talent, the group has a well-staffed and resourced recruitment division supported by highly experienced recruitment consultants in each country. The Division offers a full stack of recruitment services including head hunting for hard to get personnel to fill positions. The group has also invested in a modern recruitment system that supports vacancy advertisements, AI-powered shortlisting and candidate interaction tools in any country in Africa. And who else can be the lead headhunter than Joseph Mathenge ? His good network among top executives in Africa can connect his recruiters with reliable contact in key industries to map out potential headhunting targets in a matter of hours.
The payroll division with a modern payroll hub based in Nairobi Kenya has modern multicurrency and multiclient payroll system based on the Odoo platform. With this system the group can pay a non-limited number of staff in five international currencies and any local African currency at the click of a button.
We asked Joeph how he manages such a diverse pool of talent made of IT, Marketing, HR, Finance, Legal and Immigration professionals working on such many projects simultaneously.
‘It is all about collaboration and investment in modern IT-based collaboration tools. Our staff can communicate with each other, hold meetings, and attend shared training from any device, including mobile phones. They can access company emails and shared files from any device as all our systems are cloud-based.’ Joseph Mathenge responds.
It is not unusual for Joseph Mathenge to hold virtual meetings while on a long flight as all he needs is internet connectivity on flights to log onto three of the alternative virtual meetings platforms from his phone.
Shaping a People-Empowering a People Driven Leadership Approach at CareerOptions Africa Group
So how did Joseph Mathenge manage to put an Africa outfit on the global HR map so easily in this ever-changing landscape of human capital? It is because Joseph Mathenge is one of these visionary leaders whose experience is marked by intentionality, focus, and dreams beyond boundaries. It is his belief that opportunities are intentionally created, pursued, and actualized from any corner of the globe. It is his background as a talent hunter and developer that keeps him believing that all this is possible through people–the talent pool at the Group. We have one of the youngest pools of professionals you can ever find in a group of companies. Their youthfulness, quest for success and desire to be the best in Africa drives our success. Once they have bought into the vision, assimilated the mission and jointly crafted the path to that success, there is no stopping them.
Reflecting on his leadership role as CEO and head of business development, he shares: “I appreciate the difference between the two roles. As the Chief Executive, the focus is on growing people, developing systems and structures, and driving the bottom line. Business development, on the other hand, is about driving structured business to the customer’s heart. Actually, both roles are two sides of the same coin.’ A happy customer’ This two-sided approach of focusing on business expansion and people empowerment has enabled him to create a leadership model that can be considered both strategic and sustainable.
As the CEO of Career Options Africa, Joseph Mathenge has stopped concentrating solely on the commercial aspect of the business. The role today is broader and encompasses a point of view of the entire organization and entails a delicate balance between immediate performance and long-term sustainability. “Sometimes we can perform well in one year and celebrate the profit, but if you don’t focus on long-term sustainability, then the future of the business is compromised,” he notes.
Customer is the King in the African HR Empire
However, the mark of a leader, which Joseph Mathenge has always kept, is his strong faith in the power of people. Joseph’s conviction lies in the power of relationships. “I’ve come to appreciate the importance of people to the business,” he adds. Whether employees, partners, or clients, Joseph Mathenge believes sustainable success is rooted in trust and continuous engagement with the customer. His view on relationships, whether with employees, partners, or clients, is to make it the central currency of success. He does not only concentrate on transactions but rather on the development of meaningful, lasting customer relations. He adds, ‘It is essential to establish rapport with a customer in a way that they can ensure the survival of the business in the long run. Our customers trust us to deliver, to overcome our immediate challenges, to improve our processes to match their growing needs and most importantly, to be there tomorrow as a stable business.’
A Business Crafted for the African Business Climate
Joseph Mathenge leads because he has a firm grasp of a crucial fact, that part of building a thriving business that is fast expanding in the Africa continent calls for sober acceptance of the realities of the African business climate. Africa countries are still at the infant stage in many ways. The vibrant legal framework supporting HR outsourcing, immigration and payroll services in the developed world is totally lacking in Africa. HR outsourcing Business is said to be illegal in some countries even when there is no law abolishing it. But there is no law legalizing it as well. So, you are at the mercy of technocrats in the Ministry or Labour, directorate of immigration of tax authorities to interpret the limited laws as they deem fit.
One day you are getting work permits as an EOR agency in one African country, the next day EOR agencies cannot sponsor work permits. Joseph Mathenge gives an example of a labour dispute in an East Africa country where the judge ruled that the former employee of the group had sued the wrong employer by suing Career Options Africa Ltd. The court held Joseph Mathenge could not stand and present the employer’s defense as the key employer witness. On the other hand, the court could not issue summons to the international client to file a defense because the contract was between Career Options Africa and the employee, not between the international NGO and the employee. The court eventually had to revise its own decision and admit Career Options as the respondent to the suit.
Navigating such an environment requires Joseph Mathenge to invest heavily in multiple third-party professional experts in each country of operation including lawyers, tax consultants, auditors, industrial relation experts etc. to support the business navigating the endless handles. Sometimes it feels like wanting to run an agricultural business in a war zone full of mines. You need to hire mine removal experts before you can bring on your bulldozers to clear the forest each time you want to expand the farm.
Navigating Multiple Compliance Regimes
With 99% of the clients being international firms from all over the globe, Joseph Mathenge must navigate through multiple compliance regimes. An American company with operations in Kenya technical applies both USAand Kenya Labour law regimes to offer all their employees globally the same benefits welfare packages etc. as part of the equity and inclusive initiatives. American companies are also required to abide by all American laws anywhere they operate in the world on certain respects like corporate governance, fair competition etc. The US has some of the stringent anti- money laundering and antifraud laws in the world. Kenya banks on the other hand are governed by Central Bank of Kenya regulations and local banking laws.
There are personal data an employer in Kenya is not required to maintain regarding employee salaries processed through the bank but the same is a requirement under US Law. There is personal data which is illegal to share about the employees with local labor and tax authorities under US law but must be shared with labor authorities under Kenyan law. It is for this reason that long before Kenyan enacted the Data Protection ACT. Joseph Mathenge was already certified in the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) Act.
Nevertheless, Joseph Mathenge does not see compliance as an unnecessary pain. He explains the benefits of this of the duality as an incentive for Africa countries to review, update or repeal their very old set of laws some inherited from the colonial rulers and adopt global HR and human right codes. Both locally and internationally, whether regarding confidentiality, data privacy, anti-human trafficking laws, or larger human rights frameworks, Joseph has made sure Career Options Africa Group is compliant. ‘We must ensure that we are not merely interpreting the law with Kenyan eyes, South African eyes, Nigerian eyes-but also global eyes.’He adds.
Our distinct offer is deep understanding of the local environment coupled with an outlook for global compliance which makes Career Options Africa a reliable bridge between the two continents. ‘The company is no longer a business that simply facilitates other businesses to conduct their business in Africa; it is a business that supports businesses to conduct their operations in Africa in an ethical, accountable, and truly people-respecting way,’ he notes.
His ability to drive his strategic priorities and his people oriented vision is not only transforming Career Options Africa into a market leader but is also reconceptualizing being a true cross-border leader with a cause.
What is the Future of The Group?
Joseph Mathenge sees the current business model of the group as ‘the foot soldier’with boots on the ground.
More than half of the group’s business is obtained from other bigger HR agencies with a global footprint but lacks offices in Africa, through a partnership model. With their own offices in multiple Africa countries, Career Options becomes the service points for these global HR agencies in Africa. The so-called staffing aggregators have the resources and vibrant digital marketing tools to secure large EOR business for multiple locations in Europe and Africa from the European headquarters of the Multinationals but not the foothold to offer compliance in each African country.
Career Options is positioning itself for a bigger share of that value chain by investing in modern ICT systems to create service points in every Africa country and representative offices in Key European Countries. Already a feasibility study is underway to assess viability of recruitment hub for Europe in London and a Labour export hub for middle east in Dubai.
The future business model is a HR satellite beaming HR support services to every African City from the Nairobi hub with technical support from several regional hubs of middle east, Europe and Americas.
