A year ago, my working week ran Tuesday to Sunday, up to 14 hours a day, with Monday as my only day off. I was managing a luxury salon: customer service, accounts, inventory, and whatever HR needed doing that week. It was a real opportunity, and I don't regret the year I spent there. But it was also an industry where I once had to physically separate two hairdressers who nearly came to blows because a client asked for one of them instead of the other. Like the mediator I am, I walked them both to the office, let the one the client actually wanted finish serving her, and smoothed things over afterwards. That was a fairly normal Tuesday.
I applied to Elewa on a whim, off a LinkedIn posting. What actually stopped my scrolling wasn't the job title. It was a section I'd never seen in a job posting before: a list of what the company called culture fit: cooperative, ownership, detail, empathy, transparency. I later learned these sit alongside Elewa's own stated culture and values, but on that day it was simpler than any pillar list: "cooperative" is the one that got me. I was tired of the ruthlessness.
Everything that could go wrong, did
The irony is that my own application process was chaos, start to finish. After a written case submission, I got a first-round online interview. The power went out halfway through. Luckily I was using my phone's hotspot and did part of the interview in the dark, while stylists kept wandering into the office to grab products despite me having asked not to be disturbed. I was nervous, and I assumed that was the end of it.
It wasn't. I got invited back for a second round, and before we even started, Lily told me it was fine to keep my camera off, or to ask for a minute if I needed one. I have since learned that's not an interview trick to put candidates at ease. It's just how people at Elewa treat each other, before and after you are hired.
The third round was in person, with the CEO, during the Easter holiday. If you know Mombasa Road, you know what that traffic looks like: one giant parking lot. I got out of the Uber, jumped on a motorbike, and the rider didn't slow down for a single bump getting me there on time. At the reception, Martha calmed me down with a glass of water and answered the question I was too embarrassed to ask anyone else: how do you actually pronounce the CEO's name. The interview went well. I even made a joke about him resembling a well-known Swedish actor, and it landed (I hope).
Then, because of some internal restructuring, I didn't hear anything for nine months. Long enough that I had genuinely forgotten about the job, until a call from an unknown number asked if I could come in to discuss the role.
What actually changed once I started
The first thing that hit me was the hours: eight a day, Monday to Friday, instead of six days of double shifts. The second was how documented everything is. My first day, Lily spent the whole day walking me through the office, introducing me to people who then walked me through their own work. Nobody handed me a manual and disappeared.
I'm not going to pretend I arrived fluent in tech. I still don't feel fluent. In our weekly "lesson of the week," someone will drop a technical term and I will be sitting there scratching my head. What that has taught me is to stay genuinely open to learning rather than pretend I have already got it, because Elewa's "own the outcome" value is not really about never getting something wrong. It's about admitting it when you do and asking for help instead of quietly hoping nobody notices.
What did carry over from the salon: customer service, working with people, keeping supplier relationships healthy, which now shows up in how I handle procurement. I still half-joke that I would like to think of myself as the personality hire on a team full of people who understand systems I'm only starting to understand.
If you're on the fence
Apply for that job. Be prepared, and always have a backup for something going wrong, because if I wasn't using my mobile data when the power cut out mid-interview, that interview would have simply ended, and I might never have gotten a second one. You don't need to already speak the language of the industry you're applying into. You need a bit of luck, a backup plan, and, it turns out, a workplace that's actually cooperative enough to give you room to catch up.
If any of this sounds like the kind of place you'd want to send that mid-application backup plan to, Elewa's current openings are a good place to start.
