After months of reviewing its business model, Andela has now cast an open net for specialised software engineers as part of efforts to rebuild its global talent pool and create more opportunities for a larger number of people on the continent.
The most wanted senior engineers would have to have a full-stack experience with back-end languages like Node, React, Python, and Ruby which are in demand.
Jeremy Johnson, co-founder and CEO of Andela said it has taken the company five years to become experts at identifying engineering excellence from non-traditional backgrounds. Prior to the new model of sourcing talents everywhere, Andela had relied on its in-house people which it trained to service the market. By adopting the new model, Johnson says Andela is giving an opportunity to “extremely” talented software engineers located in different parts of the continent. The company is also driven by a newfound belief that opportunity should not be limited by proximity to a major tech hub.
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“By removing restrictions on location, we will double our pool of potential talent to the roughly 500,000 engineers in Africa who can now leverage Andela to work with top international engineering teams,” Johnson said. “Ultimately, our goal is to break down the barriers that prevent talent and opportunity from connecting by providing an easier, more efficient way for companies to scale global engineering teams.”
Although the African continent has seen a considerable uptake in software development activities, it still lags peers in many parts of the world in the number of engineers. Nigeria for instance only contributes between 6000 to 10000 software engineers which are far below its potential in terms of the population of young people. A bigger concern is that the tech ecosystem on the continent is not big enough to absorb the existing engineers, which is partly the cause of the challenges Andela has had recently.
To position itself for the future, Andela recently completed the transition to full-remote, which began with pilots in Ghana in 2018 and Egypt in 2019. By accepting engineers from outside the capital cities in these countries, Andela was able to select and work with a broader range of top tier technical talent and recorded no reduction in productivity. The company plans to maintain its rigorous application process in order to build the strongest talent pool for software engineers on the continent.
The company says its talents continue to be in demand for high growth companies in the US which in the light of the COVID-19 are continuing to hire talents.
“The world is beginning to realise that remote work is going to be a major catalyst for the democratisation of opportunity. Luckily, engineering leaders already know that remote work works if you have the right processes and systems in place, and are at the forefront of this change. By doubling our talent pool, we’re proud to help accelerate their critical work of building the future,” Johnson said.
In addition to enabling experienced engineers to build global careers, Andela continues to invest in the Andela Learning Community, a program that has introduced over 100,000 learners from across the continent to software engineering.
