Any organisation looking to hire employees will need to register through the RSSB website
Employee registration is free of charge. The detailed process, including the required documents to register a new employee, can be found on the
RDB Business Procedures.
As soon as you have officially hired staff you are liable to pay the relevant monthly RSSB contributions. This is paid to the RRA. Make sure to do this by the deadline to avoid incurring a fine!
For specific assistance or to ensure that you have not missed anything, the help of an accountant is generally recommended.
Some of the employee contributions include:
Pay as You Earn (PAYE)
PAYE is a tax on employment income that is withheld by employers on behalf of their employees. This is to save employees having to each declare their own income. Instead, the employers are required to declare and pay PAYE on behalf of their employees.
For employees registered with RSSB, the monthly contribution represents 15% of the employee’s basic salary. It is paid by both the employer and the employee at the rate of 7.5% each. […] The employer is responsible for deducting, declaring and paying their employee’s contribution to RSSB. The contribution is deducted on a monthly basis and paid not later than the 10th day of the following month.(RRA)
Pension Scheme:Enrolling on pension benefits is compulsory for all salaried workers (regardless of nationality) ****The contribution rates are 3% paid by the employer and 3% by the employee.(RRA)
Maternity contributionsIs equal to 0.6% of gross salary (0.3% employer’s share and 0.3% employee’s share.)(RSSB Maternity leave).
Termination of employment
Subject to the provisions of the employment contract, the period of notice given by the employer or employee must be:
At least fifteen (15) days, in case an employee has served for less than one (1) year;
At least thirty (30) days, in case an employee has served for more than one (1) year.
The notice must be given in writing and state the reasons for termination of the employment contract.(Labour Law, 2018)
In cases of gross misconduct, the employer must notify the employee within 48 hours of the occurrence of evidence of the gross misconduct specifying the grounds for termination.
Recruitment options
These are the main avenues for recruiting:
Through own networkWhether looking for consultants or hiring for senior and management-level positions it is not uncommon to find people through recommendations within Kigali’s business scene. The EBCR network in particular can be a great source for recommendations for these types of roles in accounting, recruitment, software engineering and others. (Case Study → Viebeg Medical)Bear in mind that highly-skilled Senior-level hires can be hard to find locally and thus especially expensive. (Case Study →Viebeg Medical)
Recruitment consultanciesThere is a range of recruitment consultancies to choose from in Kigali often specialising in different sectors.For entry-level candidates, we recommend speaking to BAG Innovation. Alternatively to staff your organisation with top-level applicants you can contact Sandberg Ltd.
If you are looking to find a local business partner speaking to a recruitment consultancy is strongly recommended as they can find out about the local reputation and do background checks. (Case Study →Sandberg Ltd)
Hiring fresh graduatesHiring graduates can also be done by directly contacting educational institutions. Institutions here are quite receptive to companies in the private sector offering internships to fresh or near graduates. (Case Study →Hollandia Fair Foods) Some of the local institutions include:
It is quite common for Members to report a relatively lower skill level for fresh graduates compared to equivalent graduates from European institutions. As such, you can expect to have to spend considerably more time in the initial training. (Case Study → Viebeg Medical)
Popular job boardsAnother option is to place an ad on the following popular online job boards:
Overall, the educational level in Rwanda is still quite low. This is a well-known problem to most foreign entrepreneurs here. We advise to keep low expectations in terms of skill level (particularly for fresh graduates) and focus on hiring candidates for potential instead while focusing on training them in-house. (Case Study → BDO Rwanda)
Similarly, members have often reported a low quality of service for certain consultants (especially in accounting services). Good, reliable consultants (e.g. in accounting, recruitment, software, etc.) exist but they are few and hard to find. Seeking recommendations through a local network like EBCR can go a long way toward saving time and money trying to right people. (Case Study → Hollandia Fair Foods)
For senior roles (e.g. CFO, COO, etc.) hiring from abroad is possible but bear in mind that this should be thoroughly justified with the appropriate immigration services to acquire a work permit. Please see the section on Immigration for more information.
One particularity of the job market in Rwanda (and especially Kigali) is that it is heavily affected by the presence of NGOs. The non-profit sector often offers very high salaries in comparison to the local private sector (sometimes as much as 10 times higher). This results in a strong preference for non-profit roles among top-level candidates alongside the risk of losing employees to the non-profit sector after one or two years. (Case Study → BAG Innovation)
#hr
My Kenyan partner had been in Rwanda for 10 years working for one of the biggest Medical Supplies companies in East Africa, so he knew a lot of people in the industry. We invited some of these people for interviews. We were also lucky that we had a big pool of people that were recommended to us.
So generally, when it comes to hiring for managing positions, we usually try to find people coming from the medical supplies industry. But with some other positions, such as admin, operations, and IT, it’s been very difficult to find the right people, because we don’t have any referrals. Some of our hires for these roles have turned out to be good, others not so much.
We do try to provide training to all of them, and a lot of them are already enrolled in an educational program in parallel such as a master’s degree.
As a general rule, the level of education is not as high as it is in Europe. I don’t think that’s a secret, but it is a problem. You’d expect someone with an MBA to have a certain skill level, while in fact, the level of practical experience is often really low here.
So, if you found someone who studied computer science, you might be surprised to find out that they don’t really know how to program.
The same is true for other fields like Finance, Accounting, Administration etc. My advice, if you want to hire graduates or near-graduates, is to be patient, hire people based on their mindset, and dedicate some time to training them. How long would you dedicate to training a young computer graduate here?
#hr
Normally a computer science graduate in Europe has 3-4 years of practical programming experience. (Without considering that, often computer science students have coding as a hobby.) Plus, through their university degrees, they have a lot of resources, with 1-on-1 and mentoring with professors, and are met with numerous opportunities to develop their skills throughout.
Whilst here, some of the graduates coming out of university, are not even junior developers. They’re real beginners. As a part of a computer science degree at a university here, you could expect that someone might have just done one or two projects – that’s all. So it would take a lot of months of training to get them to the European equivalent graduate level.
So, if they intend to work in the field, graduates often have to learn everything, nearly from scratch. This is why you see a lot of people who study computer science go and do some educational programs Andela– which are great by the way. What can you tell me about vocational training programs like Andela and WeCode?
#hr Andela, WeCode, and various other programs funded by GIZ as well as other organisations offer training for people in Rwanda who want to learn to program or improve their programming skills. In general, these programs have the virtue of teaching people enough of the basics so that they can then go on and learn more code on their own. And the more they write the more they learn.
So, these programs are good but still only really teach the basics. When people come out, you shouldn’t expect them to even be at the level of Junior developers. But once they’ve done those programs, they might be able to go do an internship. Then, after the internship, hopefully, those companies will actually employ them and help them build their skillset even further.
The only issue is that there only are limited job opportunities – especially now after Covid. So, a lot of people might not immediately get a job. Some might go ahead and find work on platforms like UpWork and other freelance platforms to get more experience, or even start their own start-up.
Have you ever reverted to hiring someone from abroad, e.g. from Europe in order to fill a particular position for which you couldn’t find the right person in Rwanda?
#hr
Yes. The issue with, for example, Senior Engineers is that people that are really good here are in very high demand.
Because a lot of organizations want really good people locally, and the salaries are quite high. So, a senior engineer in Rwanda can cost $3,000 per month. This means that before tax, it can cost you almost $5,000
If you compare that to a Software Engineer in Ukraine who might have the same or even higher skill level could get them for $1,500. This is a huge problem in this market because hiring the right Senior Engineer or CTO is crucial.
I have hired someone on a $3,000 salary for my other company before and it was a mess. It wasn’t worth the money. Some people even asked for six, seven-thousand-dollar salaries.
So, despite wanting to be an African company and hiring Africans, it is sometimes tempting to hire someone from abroad. Sometimes there are some positions that you just can’t fill otherwise. For instance, for our current CFO, we were not able to find someone who was good with tax law, so we hired an external CFO who’s based in Rwanda but who’s originally from the UK and India.
How do the regulations and laws around employees in Rwanda compare to your home country?
#tax #hr
I would say it is easier compared to most places in Europe. Things like laying off employees etc are either similar or easier to do in Rwanda, to the benefit of the employer.
The process for hiring employees is easy too and doesn’t take too long. You just have to register as a company. Register your new employee at RSSB and then you start paying them.
What can be tricky, is calculating the PAYE tax to pay for each employee, and making sure you don’t make mistakes. Then there’s the RSSB contribution (Pension & Medical insurance), and the various allowances for every employee. So, it is something that is a bit more complex, but the contracts and laws are quite straightforward and similar to Europe.
In our case, it has been our accountant sorting these things out for us, such as how much tax we have to pay etc. But even then, despite having an accountant some mistakes were made at the beginning.
When you’re a big company, doing business in Rwanda is a lot easier because you can get the right people and the right advisers to help you. You also benefit from the extra help from RDB, which includes having a key account manager [see RDB Aftercare Service] etc.
While as a small company, and you want to do everything yourself, things can be a bit more complicated in the beginning.
#hr
We have sourced it locally; all our staff are Rwandan.
You can find talent, it’s just very hard. But since we were also running a recruitment company we were going through over 10 of thousands of people in our database which meant we had the luxury of the first selection. So, the people we interviewed and engaged with, from the different universities were eventually hired through BAG.
There are actually a lot of talented people, it’s just that competitiveness is not really there yet, and the market is not developed yet. With students in Europe, you can see peers compete with each other and this healthy competition actually increases everyone’s capacity. In Rwanda, it’s still not at that stage.
What are the preferred jobs in Rwanda? Are people excited at the idea of working for start-ups? Do top applicants consider working for start-ups?
#hr
Compared to big institutions someone would rather work for a start-up. But 9/10 times top-quality candidates are going to compete for the non-profit jobs.
Because, while a start-up might pay a salary of USD 300 per month, a non-profit might pay a salary of USD 3,000 per month. This is completely unrealistic compared to the market but unfortunately, there are so many non-profits in the country that they effectively drain the top talent out of the market.
Which is understandable. You can’t compare these two salaries. That’s the equivalent of a graduate in Sweden getting a salary of USD 10,000 per month, without any experience.
For us, we’re 9 people, plus 4 developers (outsourced to a local Rwandan agency). So about 13. And every year, some of our staff get poached by non-profits.
#startingStrategy
There are opportunities through some of these more established networks like EBCR to try and find the right people to work with.
#hr
I think it is beneficial to do your recruitment through an HR company here. Because they can do the background checks, they know the market, they know the players, they know the reputation of the people you’re recruiting.
Sometimes people can look good on paper, but their history here makes it difficult for them to operate in the market. So, getting local companies to help you find your business partner here I think can be really beneficial and can help you avoid mistakes from the beginning.
How did you find your Drive plus
#hr
This was mainly done by Sam. I think he posted the adverts for “Driver Plus” jobs on RwandaJob.com.
Within a month we had about 855 applicants. At that point, we didn’t yet know where the depo would be so it was mentioned in the ad that accommodation, meals, and transport back and forth would be covered – and that is the kind of working environment we’ll be looking to offer in general.
From the 855 applicants, I think we interviewed about 30 – 40.
Unfortunately, we only had 4 female applicants. We interviewed all of them, but it didn’t work out. (Though I think one of the ladies that we interviewed will become an admin as soon as we start building up our admin team).
We have plans for the next depo – which is likely to be in Nyamagabe – to be fully staffed by women, including female Driver’s Plus.
Overall, we’re aiming to get a 50/50 gender ratio across drivers, mechanics, assembly engineers and admin staff. To help us achieve that, within the 2 to 3 months before opening the next depo we will ask the women that we’ve hired to work with our current Drivers Plus in Nyamasheke so that they get to know the systems, the processes and so that they get comfortable with the trucks.
So, for the hiring, we haven’t gone through a recruitment agency. Our main person of support has been Sam. Sam had used RwandaJob.com. before and he’d hired for numerous companies in Rwanda like that.
Sourcing talent is a challenge. But then you also need to ask yourself: what are you trying to build?
If you’re building a “profit-focused” business you can do what the others do: Fly people in when they have assignments or run a very lean team and source consultants as required.
On the other hand, if you’re building a business in the long run and you’re looking to create a truly locally established company, with a 5-year vision of growing presence and portfolio then you need to build your capacity and do training. And the best way to do training is to get fresh learners.
Here, we get about 10 graduates annually for 6-month internships. From those, more or less 60% will become permanent staff. So, after 6 or 7 years of operation, you have close to 30 – 40 people who you have trained internally and who have grown into management levels. Of course, an audit firm is an easy place to head-hunt from, but you also have a natural rotation. In our case, we have about 20% resignations per year. But that’s the only way to build a company long-term. If I judged my performance solely on annual profit, I would not invest in training people.
#insight
We have been experiencing very big economic growth, especially in the services sector and we feel the shortage of talent. At the same time, we are exposed to losing people because they get easily hired elsewhere (even with our own clients as they like to have their auditor become their finance manager). It is part of the dynamics. But still, the only way to build organisational stability is to train. Even if that means the best talent goes first.
Where do your staff go when they leave?
#hr
Often, they go into other businesses, some go to work for the Government. So far, we haven’t lost much staff to the non-profit.
How have you sourced the right people for your organisation?
#hr #startingStrategy
We used a lot of interns to start with. Then we kept the good ones. That’s how we’ve done most of our recruiting. Some of it has also been through references from our people.
For the most part, it’s worked fine like that. The only area we’ve had issues in was accounting…
Where did you go to source the interns in the first place?
#hr
We’ve never advertised jobs. We just go to universities, like the University of Rwanda, INES Ruhengeri-Institute of Applied Sciences or Akilah Institute for Women.
Who did you contact at the university?
#hr
We didn’t actually try to approach them. They contacted us.
Resources
This is the latest Labour Law as of July 2021 which also covers “Termination of employment”
For the most up to date version look in the Ministry of Public Service & Labour under Publications > Laws.
