CodeLn Launches Talent Marketplace to Help Companies Hire African Software Engineers with One Click.
On average, companies spend 2–3 months to fill up tech roles. If a recruiter fails to correctly match the requirements of his project to the skills he should hire for, the company risks losing productivity, time and money. CodeLn is an automated tech recruitment platform that solves this problem by making it seamless for companies to hire African Software Engineers.
It is popularly said that only an engineer can identify a good engineer. The company is a 50% female-founded team, started by four engineers from three individual African countries: Nigeria, Kenya and Ivory Coast. Having worked in the tech space, the co-founders — Elohor Thomas (Systems Engineer), Philisiah Mwaluma (Software Engineer), Dennis Ruhiu (Cyber Security Engineer), and Dexter Ouattara (Software/Network Engineer) could all attest to the fact that recruiting for software engineering roles is a hectic and time-consuming process. The team was formed at MEST after they discovered that the issue they had all faced in their different home countries was one they had the know-how to solve.
With CodeLn, the entire tech recruitment process is automated end-to-end. A recruiter can post a job, receive recommended candidates based on the skills required, conduct an online test to vet expertise, schedule an interview, and present a job offer, all without leaving the platform. The company’s slogan, “your ideal dev is just a click away,” highlights that the platform was built to optimize a fast and efficient tech hiring process. “A recruiter who is sure of the skills he needs can pick and hire a candidate from CodeLn in as little as 15 minutes,” stated Elohor Thomas, CodeLn CEO and co-founder.
There are 3 major stages in tech recruitment — Sourcing, Screening, and Interview. CodeLn’s platform handles and automates these stages in the following ways:
Sourcing: with a well-designed marketplace optimized for seamless search, CodeLn presents a rich pool of talent from across Africa. The talent pool has candidates’ profiles, skills, work experience history, and portfolio. This gives a recruiter insight into the candidate’s expertise, experience and personality.
Screening: CodeLn has an inbuilt testing tool called CLIDE which helps verify a candidate’s coding skill by assigning them a project-based assessment. The assessment is graded based on standards and best practices per programming language and aims to answer 3 key questions amongst others: Does the candidate have a core understanding of the tools being used? How easy will it be to hack into the project that the candidate is building? How easy will it be to maintain the project if the candidate leaves?
Interview: CodeLn provides a built-in applicant tracking system that helps the recruiter seamlessly schedule interviews with candidates, and easily track every stage of the application process from start to finish.
With initial offices in Lagos, Accra, and, Nairobi, CodeLn aims to become the global go-to marketplace for verified African tech talent. “We currently have a database of over 8000 software engineers from across 12 African countries, and the number is rapidly growing daily. We have an in-built testing tool which we use to test our engineers to ensure quality on the platform, a good percentage of them are already verified and available on the marketplace for immediate hire” stated Elohor, CEO and Co-founder. CodeLn is therefore inviting tech talent (Software Engineers, Graphic Designers, Data scientist etc) from across Africa to signup inorder to gain access to both local and international job opportunities.
Following the launch, CodeLn will be offering a free list of interns to Companies registering on the platform between now and the end of December 2019. These interns will be available to work and assist with the company’s project for a given duration. Also, exclusive tech resources from IBM will be made available for the company’s tech staff for a two-year duration.
