Somewhere between building a company, convincing adults to behave like adults, and trying to run an institution that doesn’t collapse on my head, I now find myself speaking to parents of interns before HR can send out their offers.
If you told me four years ago that I would spend my mornings explaining credit infrastructure to somebody’s mum who still shouts “off the light,” I would have laughed in your face. Yet here we are, and not only am I doing it, I am now the person defending it as innovation.
Even ChatGPT, that digital errand boy that claims it’s here to help, had the audacity to tell me that it wasn’t professional. I told it “gbe enu soun.” A man must draw the line somewhere.
But there’s a story behind all this, and before you assume I’ve lost the plot, come closer and let me run the full gist from the beginning.
One year, several disappearing acts, and an HR team that aged ten years
Over the last one year, I noticed a very strange pattern. It was mostly the girls, though not exclusively, and it always happened the same way. A bright, high-performing new hire would do well, collect praise, get on everyone’s good side, show promise, and then out of nowhere, vanish over a weekend. No warning. No conversation. Nothing.
A resignation letter would drop like a bad network, phones would go off like NEPA took light, and the entire HR team would turn to Sherlock trying to track them or the guarantor. And when someone finally surfaced, usually the parent, the explanations would start flying. The child was sick. The workload was too much. The job was stressing them. The sun was too hot. The moon was misaligned. Pick any excuse; I’ve heard them all.
But nothing prepared me for Jane Doe. Jane was the kind of intern you don’t forget. She came in the first time, did an incredible job, and left everyone impressed at how fast she picked things up. She wasn’t a pity hire. She earned every bit of the respect she got, and when she asked to come back for a second internship, we were genuinely happy to have her. She was one of those interns you imagine eventually hiring full-time with no hesitation.
So imagine our surprise when, less than a week into her reemployment, a short, vague email landed in my inbox. She was resigning with immediate effect. No clear reason. Something about “undisclosed health issues.” She didn’t tell her team lead. She didn’t inform HR. She didn’t say anything to her colleagues. She simply vanished.
We spent 24 hours trying to reach her. Nothing. Calls went nowhere, messages were ignored, and the entire thing felt like a ghost story. When we eventually got through, she had no coherent explanation. No clarity. Nothing that matched her initial eagerness or the brilliance she had shown in her first internship.
It was confusing, painful, and downright frustrating. And it wasn’t just her. She was simply the incident that snapped everything into focus.
At first I was furious. Actually, scratch that, I was livid. I kept asking myself how someone could come into a serious workplace, learn, get paid, grow, and then exit the building like a thief in broad daylight with no courtesy of a conversation. But when anger doesn’t solve the problem, wisdom must step forward. So, as usual, I went to lease some sense.
The ‘leave that job now’ parenting era is wreaking havoc
When we finally made it easier for people leaving to open up without fear of consequences (nobody dies on this job, so there’s no point holding anyone hostage), things became clearer. A pattern emerged across the stories, and it was almost too obvious once I saw it.
Parents, particularly those who grew up with traditional workplaces where people wore ties, carried files, and lived inside offices, were seeing their children work hard in a remote setting and deciding that it was slavery.
Many of these young hires still lived at home. So the parent was watching them glued to a laptop, joining meetings, taking feedback, working long hours, dealing with the normal chaos of tech, and they couldn’t process it. Their reaction was simple:
“This job is stressing my child. Leave immediately.” And when your parent gives that instruction in a home where you aren’t paying rent, feeding yourself, or contributing significantly, what power do you have to argue? Your father has spoken. Your mother has spoken. You pack your bag and run.
Even the children themselves weren’t saying the work was too much. They were complaining like normal adults do. Only psychopaths don’t complain about their jobs. But to the parents, the grumbling meant their child was suffering spiritual torment in a workplace run by sadists.
Remote work fooled us all
I knew deep down that if we weren’t a remote company, this whole parental intervention problem wouldn’t exist. If these kids were leaving the house every morning, catching crowded buses, dealing with Lagos traffic, getting shoved around by conductors, occasionally having money or items stolen, their parents wouldn’t see any of it. They would only meet a child who left home early and returned tired, and that would be the story they would take home. They wouldn’t see the work itself, the deadlines, the meetings, or the mental load, so they wouldn’t panic.
Instead, parents see their kids at home, glued to screens (an age-long beef still exists between parents and screens), typing away, attending back-to-back calls, and solving problems they don’t understand. When a young hire complains about a tough day, which any normal person would, they interpret it as suffering or exploitation. Because the kids live at home, the parents feel entitled to intervene. And most of the time, there’s nothing the child can do about it.
Remote work has turned parents into accidental supervisors in their children’s careers. They see everything, but they don’t have the context or experience to understand what’s actually happening. And without that context, even normal complaints or adjustments get blown out of proportion, which ends up creating a whole new HR headache we never signed up for.
The idea that sounded ridiculous until it made perfect sense
So one day, I asked myself a genuinely mad question: “What if I talk to the parents?”
What if I picked up my phone like the responsible adult that I am and explained the job to them man-to-man or man-to-woman? Tell them what the internship involves, the six-month structure, the pay progression, the job rotation system, the technical skills the children will pick up, the growth they can expect, and the general madness of early-career tech work.
If someone called me regarding my daughter, wanting to explain her opportunities and what the journey would look like, I would appreciate it. So why wouldn’t I extend the same courtesy to other parents?
That’s how this experiment started. It wasn’t a grand strategic initiative. It wasn’t something I wrote on a whiteboard and presented to the team. It was simply me deciding to try something different instead of sitting down complaining about a problem that kept repeating itself.
Talking to parents is now a full-blown pastime I didn’t know I needed
Let me confess: I don’t even know if this will work in the long run, but I’m enjoying the process more than I expected.
When I call these parents, the first thing I hear is pride. Genuine pride. They talk about how well their children did in school, how they graduated at the top of their class, how they have always been hardworking and responsible.
We take mostly first-class candidates, so you can imagine the warmth of these conversations. Nobody raises a child to be mediocre, and hearing it from the parents reminded me that these young people are more than their weekend disappearances.
I also explain everything we do at Lendsqr. Not the usual corporate website talk, but real explanations of how digital lending works, how we serve lenders, the engineering that goes into the product, the skills their children will learn, and why the early stages of a tech career can feel heavy before it becomes rewarding.
It has become unexpectedly fulfilling, in a very odd way.
Will all this reduce attrition? Even I don’t know yet
I wish I could stand here and tell you confidently that this initiative is going to fix attrition once and for all. The truth is, I don’t know. We’re still collecting data, watching patterns, and seeing how it plays out over time. Some of these things can’t be rushed or predicted.
If it does work, I’ll be the first to come back and brag about my brilliance in figuring it out. Don’t take that as a promise though, I’ll probably exaggerate anyway. Innovation is rarely neat. Most of the time it’s just frustration meeting desperation, refusing to give up, and then hoping it sticks.
In the meantime, I’ll keep doing what I started. I’ll keep picking up the phone, talking to parents, listening to their concerns, reassuring them that their children are learning, growing, and not being worked like field labourers. I’ll explain what we do, what they gain, and why the early struggles are part of the process. And I’ll do it gladly, because these conversations are worth it, until the company grows so big that I can’t possibly make the calls myself.
When that day comes and I’m sure it will, we’ll figure out a new way. That’s what we do. We adapt, we experiment, and we keep moving forward.
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