Career
Stop Applying. Start Being Referred.
You send out applications into a void and hear nothing back, while people with less experience keep landing the roles you wanted.
Most good jobs in Nigeria are filled before they are ever advertised. By the time a role appears on LinkedIn or a job board, the hiring manager has usually already asked three trusted people whether they know someone. The public posting is often a compliance exercise, not a search.
This is not corruption. It is risk management. Hiring is expensive and a bad hire is worse than an empty seat, so managers default to the candidate someone they trust will vouch for. The referral is not a shortcut past the assessment — it is what gets you assessed at all.
Which means the highest-return career activity is not polishing your CV. It is being known by the people who get asked. That is built slowly: doing visible work, being useful without an immediate ask, and staying in contact with former colleagues long after you need something from them.
In practice
A product designer in Lagos spent four months applying to roles with no response. She stopped, and instead spent six weeks publishing one short teardown of a Nigerian app every week on LinkedIn — what worked, what didn't, what she would change. By week nine, three companies had reached out. She never submitted another application.
Referrals are not who you know. They are who has seen your work.
Action step
Message one former colleague today with no ask attached — just tell them what you are working on and ask what they are building.