Wambui Kariuki

In my role, I oversee HR Business Partners and HR Leads across Amref's Country offices in 10 African countries, ensuring that all HR initiatives are in sync with the organization's strategic direction. I collaborate with business leaders and executives to craft HR strategies aimed at attracting, nurturing, and retaining talent within Amref Health Africa.

In this role, I was responsible for defining the talent management strategy and bring this to life, while working closely with the business to ensure this aligns with the growth agenda of the firm. This role also entailed owning and driving the Talent Acquisition function, working as a close partner and trusted resource for People Operations and Leadership. The role also entailed: • Leading on all talent development, learning and coaching within the business • Establish a strong recruiting culture which empowers hiring managers to make excellent talent decisions for their team and the company. • Evaluate and implement employer branding strategies, systems, and processes. • Lead the D&I initiatives as it intersects with hiring to continuously improve our diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. • Partner with executives, the People Team and empowered employees to develop and implement sustainable, data driven D&I programs that enhance the employee experience from onboarding through all stages of the employee life cycle

In this role, I was responsible for supporting 2500+ employees by providing leadership and expertise in key areas of organizational/cultural health, talent assessment and management, building high performance teams, organizational design and coaching.

• In this role I was responsible for providing operational and strategic HR support to the Directors and their senior leadership teams within the Support Functions comprising: Risk Management, Finance, Internal Audit, Corporate Affairs, Strategy & Innovation and the CEO’s office • Responsible for strengthening the leadership team of each function by providing coaching and leadership development to senior managers and heads of department. • Responsible for Talent Management - Identifying and developing talented employees to build leadership and functional bench-strength. • Acting as a change-agent as the business continued to reshape itself with a goal of providing a world class customer and employee experience.

As part of the Safaricom Talent & Resourcing team, I was responsible for identifying and engaging top talent, developing talented employees, mapping the overall African talent market, developing the attraction and development strategy for the Safaricom Discover Graduate program and providing competitive intelligence to Safaricom’s leadership. This role entailed developing lasting relationships with recruiting teams and hiring managers. I also used numbers and was able drawing insights from analytics to make our hiring process smarter and more efficient. Responsibilities • Partner with senior level management on high-profile leadership requisitions and assist them in determining and fulfilling their talent needs. • Create and execute leadership search strategies across a variety of product areas and functions, either focused on Technology and leadership roles at Safaricom. • Identify, evaluate, and present leadership talent to senior management across Safaricom. • Build relationships with strong leadership talent in the marketplace. Source passive candidates through research, internal and external networking, and direct outreach. • Leverage strategic thinking, influencing and coaching skills in order to run a successful search process and help hire exceptional talent • As the HRBP for marketing, I was responsible for driving the people strategy, organizational design, leadership development and process of change and transformation that was essential to build stronger functional organizations capable of enhancing business performance.

Responsible for managing the end-to-end talent acquisition process (planning, sourcing, selection, hiring, pre-joining) for the country’s / region’s talent programmes, including: • Experienced hires • International Graduate Programme • Group Internship Programme Responsible for developing appropriate local talent acquisition strategies (aligned with global strategies) to deliver the country / region’s targets for the above programmes, ensuring the right candidates are recruited, at the right time, at the right price.

The Resourcing Manager’s primary purpose was to provide world class recruitment service within the African Markets and support the internal and external recruitment process (responsible for managing the recruitment process for all internal openings and external openings) The role focused on ensuring there was a smooth and timely resourcing process for internal and external candidates and hiring managers in Africa. The role entailed project-managing hiring assignments to ensure an excellent and consistent experience for managers and candidates, with full utilisation of careers shop / Brassring and resourcing processes within the market. The role also focused on the sourcing of graduates into Diageo across the Africa region, working closely with the Early Career Talent Specialist for Africa, in-market resourcing specialists, Talent Delivery Managers and HR Business Partners. Achievements • Effectively reducing the time to hire for external roles by 20% by ensuring that phone screens are efficient and effective. • Ensuring that Kick off meetings take place for all roles within EABL to ensure that we get the recruitment right the first time and ensuring that we continue to reduce our time to hire. • Embedding the resourcing model across East Africa by ensuring the Resourcing coordinators are up skilled to handle all Brassring requests. • Building excellent relationships with the various HR Business Partners and embedding the new Diageo Resourcing Model.

This position entailed supporting the talent acquisition needs for our various clients such as Coke, Microsoft, Google, Nokia, University of Washington and Old Mutual. Mainly responsible for the full-life cycle recruitment activities and ensuring that quality candidates were sourced, screened and presented for open positions. The Recruitment and Administration Manager is responsible for managing the full recruitment cycle with a strategic focus on sourcing, recruiting and retaining top talent. • Consulted with HR Business partners to initiate and develop in-depth and innovative talent acquisition strategies and plans to fill position vacancies or to provide guidance and subject matter expertise for future talent acquisition planning for the assigned client. • Aggressively recruited for well-qualified candidates from a variety of sources, assesses candidate pool, selects candidates, conducts interviews, recommends top candidates to hiring manager/s for interviews and hiring, provides guidance for the negotiation/offer phase to close the candidate and completes associated tasks including offer letter preparation and follow-through. Achievements • I successfully headhunted, interviewed and placed candidates for the following clients: Old Mutual, CFC Stanbic, Nairobi Bottlers, Christian Blind Mission, Nation Media Group and Nokia International. • I consistently met and exceeded the client’s expectations by presenting candidates within the two week turnaround period or even less. • I developed and maintained excellent business relationships with various heads of HR as well as line managers. • Successfully introduced and implemented an alternative candidate sourcing method thus reducing the two week turn-around time. • Designed and implemented an MS Excel and MS Word assessment test for one of our clients as a pre-screening tool.

Mainly responsible for recruiting, providing guidance to managers on hiring practices, overseeing performance management and succession planning to ensure the Company hired and retained the most qualified employees for each position in each of the different locations. • Responsible for establishing partnerships and maintaining close relationships with business management to recognize, identify, and understand business trends, issues, goals and needs for present and future business initiatives. • Responsible for providing strategic human resource insight and guidance on organization issues and business implications pertaining to specific projects and initiatives. • Responsible for developing cost effective recruiting strategies while providing key talent in a timely manner. • Responsible for providing ongoing consulting and support services to business unit managers in the execution/delivery of HR programs and policies as well as guidance related to the management of their employees. • Responsible for facilitating the recruiting process and participated in strategic recruiting for assigned locations. • Interviewed, screened, and recruited job applicants to fill entry level, professional and technical job openings. • Coordinated recruitment efforts through online postings, building relationships with educational facilities, job fairs, etc. • Responsible for overseeing the pre-hire background screening process • Assisted in the development of training programs for managers to improve their ability to source qualified applicants, screen applicants, schedule and conduct interviews and evaluate applicant qualifications • Tracked performance of employees in key positions within Company for succession planning purposes • Worked with all levels of management on succession planning, leadership development and effective utilization of talent