Q-Sourcing is revolutionising companies’ skill sets by demonstrating what can be done with world-class talent.

Q-Sourcing is not just leading recruitment, human resource management and integrated project management outsourcing company. The businesses they work with have found them to be a critical solutions partner.

“Q-sourcing is a place where people with skills who are looking for opportunities come to either get connected to opportunities that fit their profile and ambition or get skills that would enable them to get employed, get a more rewarding job or even find their own dream in terms of self-employment,” explains Patrick Kabahanga Mbonye, Q-Sourcing’s CEO. “We do manpower management as well as skilling, we ensure we give you the best not only locally but to international standards.”

Of course, their work is two-sided, not just finding talent the place it wants to be, but businesses the talent that they want, and Q-Sourcing serves a range of corporate clients looking for people who meet their needs, as well as helping to up-skill their own employees. It’s a job Q-Sourcing does while maintaining the very highest standards.

“We don’t settle for the expected from the market,” Mbonye says. “We look for what is available in the market and ask ‘Does this meet the standards you would get anywhere else in Africa or on the international scene?’ We ensure we give that feedback to clients so that they are able to move to that level of expectation. That’s our distinguishing factor.”

The evidence of those standards can be seen in the enormous range of trade skill accreditations on the wall of the training arm of the business.

Raising Standards
However, educating businesses about the importance of maintaining those standards can be a challenge.

“While the multinational corporates appreciate this agenda we have, the local businesses still look at it from locally owned company’s perspective,” Mbonye tells us. “They look at the hire skill fit and look at it as nice to have, not critical to have. It’s only companies that have stood that test of time that appreciate the advantages of having all quality staff. Our sustainable clients tend to be those looking to the long haul for their brand.”

To demonstrate the effectiveness of the Q-Sourcing way of doing things, Mbonye draws on the success stories the company’s clients already have to tell.

“We allow our marketing department to share stories of companies that have grown into global brands with our services so that potential clients can appreciate that this is how you build a brand,” he says. “We also have some industry leaders come in to see and appreciate why we push for this agenda, talking not just about us but the importance of skilling. In our marketing, we talk not about our sales but the importance of quality staff and quality skills and talent management. It’s slow, but it’s picking up”.

Of course, simply knowing the value of international skill standards isn’t enough. Implementing them requires a wealth of materials and technology.

“The international standard for skill fits requires access to technology, input materials and resources in terms of reading material and more,” Mbonye says. “We tend to be the pioneers in that space when it comes acquiring that and bringing it into the local playing field, but the cost of bringing that in is our cost and our competition then builds on what we have already done. That’s an inevitable challenge.”

This means that Mbonye himself feels he personally has to stay abreast of the very latest developments.

“First of all myself I keep reading. I keep in touch,” Mbonye says. “I went to Stanford Business School, and that programme exposed me to people I am still in constant communication with.”

But ultimately, any talent-based organisation is only as good as its people.

“The final challenge is keeping a good pool of human resources to lead this agenda, because you develop such a high quality of human resources a lot of foreign entities are looking to acquire these people,” Mbonye points out. “You are in danger of becoming a shopping centre. You have to keep increasing the adhesive factor for the staff to the company.”

Q-Sourcing achieves this by showing its people the wealth of opportunity that exists within the company.

“I always tell my managers to read and let them know any new innovation they want to try out I will back them up,” Mbonye insists. “That is how I keep them interested and hungry for more. So they move away from thinking about outside opportunities and look at the opportunities that lie ahead with us.”

New Ways of Working

Innovation has become even more essential at the moment, with the COVID-19 pandemic fundamentally changing the way many companies do business.

“Fortunately for us, we had an agenda of going digital before this started, because we work across borders,” Mbonye says. “We’re in five countries and we want to spread to the rest of the continent, and to maintain the operational business model we needed to quicken that process whenever we enter a new market. So when COVID hit it was easier to sell this change because we’d already started the jump.”

The real challenge, Mbonye tells us, was still the one of making businesses understand the importance of up-skilling and recruiting staff with international-level standards.

“The challenge was in continuing to relate with our clients,” he says. “The corporates and international companies, that was a lot easier. They could see we were speaking the same language while the locals had the same challenge I mentioned before. But they are coming around.”

There’s an old joke about marketing, “Half of our advertising budget is wasted, but I don’t know which half”. Q-Sourcing faces a similar dilemma in trying to spread the word.

“How do we measure the quality of a marketing strategy? That skill is very strange territory for us. We don’t find good resources locally that can help us, especially in the space that we’re in because it’s a new space for the people productivity sector,” Mbonye says. “It’s still a multinational corporate space, and skilling, again, is also still a corporate space. So we’re speaking to the locals who are the bigger market opportunity. There is no crystal ball solution yet. We’d really like to see some growth there.”

Indeed, Mbonye has big plans for Q-Sourcing’s future.

“We will be working with bigger brands on the continent and eventually international brands with the objective of bringing international ingredients into the African continent and to local labour,” he says. “Our goal is to be able to go anywhere and set up shop and deliver international standards training. I want the brand to be breaking boundaries.”