What an employer is actually buying

A vacancy is a problem with a budget

Nobody advertises a job for fun. Somewhere in that organisation, work is not getting done, a target is being missed, or a person has left and the gap hurts. The posting is a description of that pain, written by someone who may not be a specialist in your field, approved by someone who controls the money.

When you read a posting this way, the whole application changes. You stop asking "do I qualify?" and start asking "what are they trying to fix, and what in my history proves I can fix it?"

Three things every hire is judged on

Whatever the title, an employer in Kenya is weighing three questions:

1. Can this person do the work? Skills, qualifications, experience that matches the function of the role, not only its title.
2. Will they do it here? Reliability, fit with the team, willingness to commute to Industrial Area or relocate to Nakuru, comfort with the hours and the pay.
3. Are they worth the money and the risk? A hire that fails costs months. Evidence of past results lowers that risk in the employer's mind.

Your CV, letter and interview answers are all attempts to answer those three questions before anyone asks them.

Duties are not evidence

The most common weakness in Kenyan CVs is a list of duties copied from a job description: "responsible for preparing reports", "in charge of customer queries". Every other applicant had those duties too. They tell the reader what you were supposed to do, not whether you did it well.

Evidence looks different. It names a result, a scale, a change, or a problem solved:

• "Prepared monthly management accounts for a business handling about KES 40 million a month, delivered by the fifth working day."
• "Cleared a backlog of 300 customer complaints in two months by introducing a tracking sheet the whole team used."

You do not need a dramatic story. You need to show that your work had an effect that someone could notice.

Qualifications open the door; proof walks through it

In Kenya, many postings set hard requirements: a degree in a named field, CPA-K, registration with a professional body, a driving licence, a certain number of years. Those are gates. If you do not pass them, no amount of writing will help, and a good tool will tell you so before you waste a credit. Once you pass the gate, you are competing with everyone else who also passed it, and that is where evidence decides.

What this means for the rest of this course

Over the next lessons you will build a career inventory (everything you have done, with numbers), turn duties into achievements, write a two-minute story you can tell in any interview, and choose target roles deliberately. Every later lesson in the Academy draws on that material, and so does every document KaziMatch writes for you.

Start by reading your current CV as an employer would. For each line, ask: does this prove anything? Mark the lines that do. Those are your assets. The rest is what we will fix.