Graduate Employability in Nigeria: Skill Gaps, Employer Expectations, and Digital Recruitment. Subtitle: Skill Gaps, Employer Expectations, and Digital Recruitment.

This study conceptualizes the 500-vacancy disjuncture in Nigeria’s labor market: the paradox of pervasive youth unemployment coexisting with persistent reports of unfilled roles in high-growth digital sectors. While conventional economic narratives blame supply-side deficits, arguing that local university degrees fail to impart contemporary marketplace skills, this paper investigates whether this disjuncture reflects absolute skill deficits among graduates or structural mismatches produced by employer expectations and digital recruitment systems. Using a mixed-methods design, the study triangulates four distinct data streams: content analysis of 200 fintech job advertisements scraped from Jobberman and LinkedIn Nigeria (2024–2026); a platform-level LinkedIn audit of Moniepoint and its direct market competitors; critical discourse analysis of public executive statements; and qualitative content analysis of an invite-only forum of Lagos-based human resource professionals. The analysis identifies three structural mismatches: temporal gaps (curriculum lag), pricing gaps (experience inflation vs. entry-level compensation), and visibility gaps (algorithmic exclusion). Extending administrative burden theory from public administration to political economy, we introduce the concept of administrative invisibility to explain how qualified graduates who are geographically, educationally, and aspirationally proximate to digital economic hubs are systematically filtered out by modern recruitment architectures. The paper concludes with structural policy interventions, including NITDA-enforced algorithmic auditing frameworks and a state-backed "Digital NYSC" corporate subsidy model.