« Qualifications, experience and skills: moving beyond bias in Europe–Africa recruitment
Can an engineer who has worked in Casablanca, a Sales Director based in Abidjan, a Data Engineer trained in Dakar or an industrial manager who has built a career between Douala and several West African countries be assessed in exactly the same way as a candidate whose entire professional career has taken place in France, Belgium or Switzerland?
On paper, the answer might seem obvious: skills remain skills, regardless of the country in which they were acquired
In the reality of international recruitment, however, the situation is far more complex.
A CV is never entirely neutral. It is interpreted through the recruiter’s knowledge, professional references and, sometimes, cultural habits.
A familiar university or business school provides reassurance. A well-known company provides reassurance. A familiar job title provides reassurance.
Conversely, an African university that a European recruiter does not know, an Ivorian or Senegalese company whose scale and reputation are unfamiliar, or a job title that differs from European standards can make assessment more difficult.
The risk is then to confuse what we do not know with what has less value.
At a time when European companies are seeking to broaden their talent pools and professional mobility between Europe and Africa is increasing, learning to read CVs differently is becoming a genuine HR challenge.
For Phénicia Conseil, a specialist in international recruitment and intercultural environments, this raises another question: are we still able to identify talent when a candidate’s career path does not resemble the profiles we are accustomed to recruiting? »
- A CV is never completely universal
A CV may appear to be an international document.
Education, professional experience, skills, languages and responsibilities: its overall structure is relatively similar from one country to another.
Yet behind this apparent uniformity lie very different professional realities.
The same job title may involve very different responsibilities depending on the country, the size of the company or its organisational structure.
Conversely, two candidates with different job titles may have performed remarkably similar roles.
In Europe–Africa recruitment, this challenge is amplified by the cultural and economic differences between labour markets.
Recruiters therefore need to distinguish between several elements:
| Element assessed | Actual importance |
| Job title | 6/10 |
| Company reputation | 6/10 |
| Actual scope of responsibilities | 10/10 |
| Results achieved | 10/10 |
| Transferable skills | 10/10 |
| Professional environment | 8/10 |
| Intercultural dimension | 9/10 |
The recruiter’s first instinct should therefore be to look beyond the job title.
- The familiarity bias
One of the simplest mechanisms in recruitment is also one of the most powerful: we understand more easily what we already know.
A French recruiter immediately recognises certain leading French universities and Grandes Écoles.
A Belgian recruiter understands the Belgian university system.
A British HR Director naturally recognises British academic references.
But what happens when a CV includes institutions from Casablanca, Rabat, Abidjan, Dakar, Tunis, Douala, Accra or Nairobi?
A lack of familiarity can unconsciously become a lack of recognition.
Yet not knowing an institution obviously does not mean that the education it provides is inadequate.
The role of an international recruiter is precisely to move beyond this familiarity bias.
In a global skills market, the challenge is no longer simply to recognise universities and schools.
Recruiters must learn to recognise skills.
- Are African qualifications properly understood?
Academic qualifications are probably one of the first potential points of misunderstanding.
African education systems are themselves extremely diverse.
Some countries have educational structures historically influenced by French or British models. Others have developed their own university systems. Many institutions also offer dual degrees and international academic partnerships.
In addition, African professionals may have studied in Europe, North America, the Middle East or another African country.
The CV of an African executive can therefore be far more international than it initially appears.
The recruiter’s objective should not simply be to assess the assumed prestige of an institution.
The priority should be to understand the level of education, specialisation, skills acquired and their relevance to the position.
- Experience matters more than the logo
The same issue applies to employers.
A European recruiter will immediately recognise certain multinational companies.
However, they may know very little about a major company operating in Côte d’Ivoire, Morocco, Senegal, Cameroon or Kenya.
This lack of familiarity can artificially reduce the perceived value of a candidate’s experience.
Yet the employer’s name does not tell the whole story.
A candidate working for a company with limited international visibility may have held a particularly broad range of responsibilities.
They may have helped launch a business activity, structured a team, developed a sales network, managed a budget or supported a major transformation.
Professional experience should therefore be assessed through the reality of the responsibilities performed rather than solely through the reputation of the logo appearing on the CV.
- Versatility: an often invisible skill
This is probably one of the most interesting characteristics to look for in certain African career paths.
In organisations where functions may sometimes be less segmented than in large European corporations, an executive may be required to operate across a particularly broad scope.
Consider the example of a Logistics Manager.
Their counterpart in a large European organisation may work within a highly specialised environment, with separate departments responsible for procurement, customs, transportation, inventory or supplier management.
In another organisation, the same manager may handle several of these areas simultaneously.
Such versatility can develop strong adaptability and a broader understanding of how a company operates.
| Experience observed | What the CV says | What recruiters should investigate |
| Logistics Manager | Logistics | Procurement, customs, inventory, transport |
| Sales Director | Sales | Strategy, management, debt collection, business development |
| HR Manager | Human Resources | Payroll, employment law, recruitment, administration |
| Project Manager | Project management | Technical issues, budget, teams, suppliers |
| Site Director | Management | P&L, HR, operations, sales, safety |
The international recruiter should therefore learn to ask one simple question:
“What was actually behind this job title?”
- Responsibility levels can be underestimated
Age can also be an interesting factor.
In some African professional environments, executives may gain significant responsibilities relatively early in their careers.
They may manage teams, control budgets or lead business activities at an age when a European candidate working in a highly hierarchical organisation might still hold an intermediate position.
This obviously does not mean that every African career follows this pattern.
It means that recruiters should examine the actual level of responsibility rather than deducing it from age, job title or years of experience.
Managing a team of twenty people remains genuine management experience, regardless of the country in which that team is located.
- Pan-African experience is a skill
An executive who has worked successively in Côte d’Ivoire, Senegal, Cameroon and Morocco has not simply changed countries four times.
They may have learned to operate within four different professional environments.
That distinction is fundamental.
Africa is not culturally homogeneous.
Management practices, attitudes towards hierarchy, communication styles and economic environments vary between Casablanca, Abidjan, Dakar, Douala, Lagos, Nairobi and Johannesburg.
Genuine pan-African experience can therefore represent an intercultural competence in its own right.
For certain international positions, it can become a significant professional advantage.
- The invisible skills behind the CV
Some of the most valuable skills in an international environment are precisely those that are least visible on a CV.
How can the ability to negotiate across several cultures be summarised in two lines?
How do you measure someone’s ability to work effectively in a less structured environment?
How do you identify the ability to rapidly build a professional network in a new country?
Yet these capabilities can be essential.
| Invisible skill | International weight |
| Adaptability | 10/10 |
| Intercultural intelligence | 10/10 |
| Autonomy | 9/10 |
| Professional resourcefulness | 9/10 |
| Resilience | 9/10 |
| Relationship-building skills | 10/10 |
| Ability to manage uncertainty | 9/10 |
| Cultural humility | 10/10 |
The challenge is straightforward: an Applicant Tracking System can search for “SAP” or “Python”.
It is far more difficult for it to identify cultural humility.
- Could AI make the problem worse?
Artificial intelligence is rapidly transforming recruitment.
It can process larger numbers of applications, identify skills, match profiles with job descriptions and automate certain stages of candidate sourcing.
But AI also raises a fundamental question in Europe–Africa recruitment.
What happens when an algorithm encounters an educational institution with which it is less familiar, an unusual job title or a professional career path that does not correspond to the dominant patterns in its data?
Could technology reproduce some of the limitations already found in human decision-making?
The objective is not to reject artificial intelligence.
On the contrary, AI can be an extremely valuable tool for recruiters.
But AI should not turn standardisation into an absolute recruitment criterion.
In international recruitment, an unconventional career path may be precisely the one offering the greatest value.
- Ten pieces of information recruiters should learn to decode
For a European recruiter assessing an African CV, several elements therefore deserve particular attention.
| CV information | Risk of misinterpretation | Weight |
| Unfamiliar educational institution | High | 9/10 |
| Different job title | High | 9/10 |
| Little-known local employer | High | 8/10 |
| Versatility of responsibilities | Very high | 10/10 |
| Team management | Medium | 7/10 |
| Experience across several African countries | High | 9/10 |
| Professional language skills | Medium | 7/10 |
| Management of complex environments | Very high | 10/10 |
| Experience with international groups | Low | 5/10 |
| Intercultural skills | Very high | 10/10 |
The role of an international recruitment consultancy is precisely to transform this information into elements that can be properly understood and assessed by the client company.
- European CVs can also be misread in Africa
The issue obviously works both ways.
An outstanding European executive is not automatically the ideal candidate for a position in Africa.
A CV may show prestigious employers, recognised academic qualifications and senior positions without answering one essential question:
Will this candidate succeed in their new environment?
Someone who has spent their entire career in highly structured organisations may experience difficulties when required to take greater initiative or operate with different resources.
A manager accustomed to replicating headquarters’ methods exactly may also encounter resistance if they fail to understand local practices before implementing change.
The intercultural interpretation of CVs must therefore work in both directions.
- An excellent European CV is not a passport to success in Africa
For many years, some companies may have assumed that an executive who performed well in Europe would naturally perform well in an African subsidiary.
Professional success is never automatically transferable.
Technical expertise can often be transferred.
Management behaviours are far less automatically transferable.
A manager needs to understand the new environment, observe before transforming, listen before imposing and adapt their communication style.
This is why cultural humility is becoming a genuine professional skill.
In Europe–Africa recruitment, it should be assessed with as much attention as certain technical competencies.
- Recruiting for skills rather than similarity
This is where the real challenge emerges.
For many years, recruitment has often operated through recognition.
Recruiters identify a familiar career path and naturally compare it with profiles that have previously succeeded within the company.
But this mechanism can lead organisations to recruit candidates who resemble the people they already employ.
International recruitment requires a different approach: skills-based recruitment.
The question is no longer:
“Does this CV resemble the profiles we usually recruit?”
It becomes:
“Can this person’s skills create value within our organisation?”
The difference may appear subtle.
Yet it can profoundly change the way companies recruit.
- Transferability becomes the real criterion
A skill has value when it can be applied effectively in a new environment.
This is the concept of transferability.
Can an outstanding Sales Director in Abidjan succeed in Paris?
Can a Moroccan engineer integrate successfully into a German industrial organisation?
Can a French executive effectively manage a team in Dakar?
Can a Senegalese Data Engineer join a Belgian company?
The answer cannot be found in the CV alone.
It requires a broader assessment.
| Transferability criterion | Weight |
| Professional expertise | 20% |
| Adaptability | 15% |
| Intercultural competence | 15% |
| Learning agility | 10% |
| Languages | 10% |
| International experience | 10% |
| Interpersonal intelligence | 10% |
| Motivation for mobility | 10% |
| Total | 100% |
This framework is not intended to represent a mathematical truth.
Its purpose is simply to change the question being asked by the recruiter.
- The recruiter becomes a career-path translator
In international recruitment, recruitment consultancies have a particular responsibility.
They should not simply forward CVs.
Sometimes, they need to translate them.
Not linguistically.
Professionally.
They need to explain to a European HR Director what an African candidate’s experience actually represents.
They need to explain to an African company which elements of a European executive’s experience are genuinely transferable and which may require adaptation.
This ability to decode professional backgrounds is becoming one of the key added values of an international recruitment consultancy.
The consultant effectively becomes an interpreter between two labour markets.
- The interview regains its full value
The more recruitment tools become automated, the more human interviews may paradoxically regain importance.
A CV tells us what a candidate has done.
An interview helps us understand how they did it.
Why was that decision made?
How was the team organised?
What difficulties did the candidate encounter?
How did they adapt?
How do they react when they do not understand the local codes?
These questions help reveal some of the invisible skills that cannot easily be identified from a CV.
An intercultural interview therefore does not simply consist of asking candidates whether they are “adaptable”.
Almost everyone will answer yes.
It means identifying concrete situations that demonstrate that adaptability.
- The CV needs to explain the context
Candidates themselves can improve the international readability of their career paths.
When a company is little known outside its home country, a few words can explain its business, scale or environment.
When a job title does not reflect the full scope of responsibility, the candidate should explain the main responsibilities.
When a candidate has worked in several countries, the international dimension should be clearly visible.
When they manage a significant team, the number of employees can be specified.
The international CV should therefore follow one simple rule:
Never assume that the recruiter understands your professional environment.
- Towards the intercultural CV
As recruitment becomes increasingly global, the traditional structure of the CV may itself evolve.
Alongside technical expertise, intercultural competencies could become much more visible.
Countries in which the candidate has worked.
Nationalities represented within teams they have managed.
Languages actually used in a professional context.
International mobility experience.
Cross-border projects.
Transformation environments.
Experience working with a headquarters located on another continent.
The CV would no longer simply describe a succession of jobs.
It would demonstrate an individual’s ability to operate successfully across different environments.
- Phénicia Conseil: decode before recruiting
This is precisely one of the key challenges of international recruitment between Europe and Africa.
At Phénicia Conseil, presenting a candidate cannot be reduced to forwarding a PDF document accompanied by a few lines of commentary.
The role of a recruitment consultancy is to identify what the CV does not immediately reveal.
Understand the candidate’s actual level of responsibility.
Analyse the consistency of their career path.
Identify transferable skills.
Assess motivation.
Evaluate the ability to integrate successfully.
Detect intercultural competencies.
Through Phéniciafrica and its Casablanca hub, this cross-market understanding of European and African talent takes on particular significance.
It enables recruitment to be approached not from the perspective of one continent alone, but from the bridge connecting the two.
- Talent should not depend on how familiar a CV looks
So, are African CVs misread by European recruiters?
It would be excessive to generalise.
But there is a genuine risk whenever a professional career is assessed primarily through references that are familiar to the recruiter.
An unfamiliar university is not necessarily a poor university.
An unfamiliar company is not necessarily a small company.
A different job title does not mean a lower level of responsibility.
And a career built in Africa does not have less value simply because it is less immediately understandable from Paris, Brussels, Geneva or London.
The reverse is equally important.
A prestigious European CV does not guarantee professional success in Africa.
The real challenge of Europe–Africa recruitment is therefore to move away from a logic of recognition and towards a logic of understanding.
Understanding skills.
Understanding context.
Understanding culture.
Understanding what is transferable.
In an increasingly international labour market, companies that learn to read different career paths more effectively will gain access to talent pools that their competitors may still be overlooking.
This is likely to become one of the next frontiers of international recruitment.
Talent does not need a familiar CV to have value.
Recruiters simply need to know how to read it.
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