Thrivee Attracts Thousands of Students Seeking Entry-Level Jobs

In less than eight months of operation, Thrivee, a talent-matching platform for students and early-career professionals, has gained traction among young Nigerian school leavers navigating a difficult job market.

The platform was created to address rising youth unemployment by simplifying access to suitable entry-level roles and reducing barriers that often exclude students from formal hiring processes.

Founded in 2022 by Ahmad-Tijani Bashorun, Thrivee emerged from his personal experience with repeated job rejections and systemic bias against students and fresh graduates. The platform was designed to bridge the gap between young talent and employers willing to invest in early-career professionals.

Today, Thrivee hosts a community of over 15,000 users, supported by an active network and early employer partnerships. Through a targeted matching model, it connects students and recent graduates to job opportunities aligned with their career stage.

According to Bashorun, the idea was deeply personal. “Building Thrivee was personal for me. These weren’t abstract users; they were my peers, my friends, and my own lived experience. It confirmed that the work I care most about is understanding broken systems well enough to redesign how people experience them,” he said.

He traced the platform’s origin to early 2022 after returning to Lagos from an internship in Abuja. “I genuinely believed transitioning into a fintech role would be straightforward. I had the skills, interest and drive, but weeks of silence and eventual rejection showed that none of that mattered because I was still a student,” he said.

That experience exposed a broader structural issue. “The problem wasn’t a lack of ambition or opportunities. It was friction, hiring processes that are expensive, unclear and not designed with students or early-career professionals in mind,” Bashorun added.

He said Thrivee was built to directly address these gaps by reducing cost, complexity and exclusion in traditional recruitment. The platform allows employers to engage young talent more transparently, while giving job seekers clarity and confidence.

“Seeing thousands of students join and employers actively seek early-career talent confirmed this was a real unmet need. When systems are designed around people’s realities, participation and trust follow,” he said.

Beyond a conventional startup, Thrivee positions itself as an impact-driven social enterprise focused on widening access, restoring dignity to the job search process and supporting young Nigerians’ transition into the workforce.

Thrivee is not Bashorun’s first technology-driven solution. While studying petroleum engineering, he gravitated toward product design, developing tools to address inefficiencies. His work includes a cooking gas delivery app built during his Abuja internship and an AI-powered consumer product that earned him an interview for the Thiel Fellowship, experiences that continue to shape Thrivee’s people-first approach.