Human-oriented+data-driven talent
In 2017, Andela’s new recruiting team boosted quarterly senior tech hiring by 404% through 7 steps. This is our origin story.
Andela invests in Africa’s most talented technologists. We help companies build distributed engineering teams to overcome the tech talent shortage while catalyzing the growth of tech communities across Africa.
As Andela continues to evolve, we’re learning that hiring more senior technologists is a critical part of achieving our target rate of scale. Finding and hiring elite software gurus, however, presented numerous challenges — and so the Technical Talent Recruiting team was born.
Assembling the Technical Talent Recruiting (TTR) team
In August 2017, the Technical Talent Recruiting (TTR) team consisted of a one-woman ‘Project Manager turned Recruiter’ army - and she needed reinforcements. I joined the team later that month, along with a technical leadership evangelist whose focus was driving Andela’s community and market perception efforts.
Week one coincided with Kenya’s 2017 election week, and so we started off mainly working remotely. It gave us plenty of time to research the nature of our task and brainstorm how we’d go about putting out our fires. The existing Tech Lead hires, which had come mainly from referrals, were slowing down considerably; there hadn’t been a single hire in the past six weeks.
Analyse and build: Our 7 steps
1) Collect data and feedback
We relentlessly pursued and documented external and internal feedback and overhauled our talent analytics. We partnered with our resident spreadsheet superheroine to design dashboards to track as many aspects of our performance as we could think of (to which we’re still adding weekly).
That helped us better understand our input and output, and we found an increasing list of areas to optimize - our candidate response rates were at 5%, our interview process being too long was suggested by 80% of candidates, and our interview pass-through rate at final/pre-final interview was 10%.
We tried to incorporate the findings into every action we could. It’s even extended to noticing the post-lunch energy crash after our Lagos Technical Leadership event, leading to more complex carbs next time (#nojollofrice).
2) Define the roles
Both internal (role holders) and external (candidate) feedback suggested that our role descriptions and interview process didn’t fairly reflect the roles. This led to misplaced applications and false negative interviews.
We started from scratch — met recent hires, and their managers (and so on) and worked backwards — finding out exactly what the roles would do — and so designed our new job descriptions, interview processes and candidate experience focus. We built new interviewer training workshops and calibrated alternate interviewers across all levels, allowing us to scale in line with our targeted increase in pipeline while maintaining quality and integrity.
We also sought to gain a more intrinsic understanding of candidates’ driving factors and goals. As such, we incorporated more integrity-oriented and mission alignment questions into our Values (HR) calls for initial screening of candidates. We also gave feedback during these calls to gauge receptiveness and ability to incorporate feedback where possible.
3) Control your Calendar
Human energy levels can peak at different times, but blocking out time ‘to do’ and create is one of the most productive actions that we can take (see Mihaly’s Flow).
We identified key aspects of work, allotting sections of each day for creative zones, intervals for checking internal messages (Slack can otherwise be never-ending), and healthy time dedicated towards admin. Recruiters experience vast loads of emails, interview scheduling and rescheduling, and without proper time dedicated to this, the dreaded black hole of a company (us) not responding to candidates emerges.
As a result, innovation and particularly the quality of our work spiked (deeper dive sourcing becoming more regular), while blocked admin time led to better response rates to candidates, a common piece of feedback (complaint) we were receiving.
We also broke up large-scale, planned projects into smaller deliverable subsections, and assigned timelines for each phase of projects. Having deadlines to work toward helped keep us accountable and allowed us to prioritise goals for each week. ‘Eating your frog’ as Mark Twain put it :)
4) Change the Perception
In October 2017, we hosted our first event: Andela’s Technical Leadership workshop in Lagos. Through an informational session with both internal and external executive leadership speakers, the goal was to begin discussing the scope of opportunity for industry leaders at Andela. 35 technical team leads attended with post-event applications at 186% vs target and 100% positive feedback from attendee surveys. Attendees (including myself) left with a new passion towards Africa’s technology revolution, as well as new perspectives of how to people manage, functionally manage, and how companies like Andela, Paystack and others are developing Africa while doing some very cool things.
We now host regular external tech guest sessions (speakers ranging from industry executives, Professors and tech ecosystem enthusiasts) and we recently opened up our ‘Workshop Wednesdays’ (themed discussions around tech trends) to the public.
5) Treat people well
Beyond KPIs like 360° (managerial/colleague/report) feedback and candidate surveys, the TTR team is driven by a strong belief in the importance of kindness. A such, we committed to inserting positivity in every interaction with our candidates and being experience and service-oriented. We reach a large number of actual humans daily, and as with every interview process, not everyone makes it through. Andela is looking to spread positive change even when it’s not profit-driven — and we believe that every candidate should not only have an awesome experience but also be learning and sharing knowledge throughout the entire interview process.
Life’s also too short to not be treating candidates well. Mahalo!
6) Scout the Talent
When we started, candidate response rates were at 5% and active sourcing focused on Level 1 Talent Mining.
Sourced candidates had been reviewed by Directors and Hiring Managers but received a mailing list approach, leading to the impression of spam (and also likelier to be trapped by spam filters).
We revamped.
Researching the technical skills we were looking for led to more custom Boolean search strings: “javascript” became (react or “react native” or react.js or redux), “IT project manager” became (”IT project manager”-ICT) to include ‘not’ functionality.
Aside from LinkedIn and GitHub, we followed the activity of Andelans and tech team leads and added popular discussion forums such as Medium and Youtube to our sourcing data bank, looking into highly trending React Native blogs for current enthusiasts, for example.
For reach outs, we personally scouted talent and drove the creation of more relevant blog posts to share. We wanted every reach out to be an extension of Andela’s network.
The change was significant. Response rates increased from 5% to 74% initially. Currently, they’re at 88%.
7) Stop to reflect
Data: Recruitment never sleeps. Our work never stops (hopefully) and so being constantly delivery focussed leads to stagnation…which in reality means going downhill given the pace of evolution around us. We blocked time each week, month, project launch and quarter to look back and review: how did we fail or exceed at each goal? Which aspects could be better? Why did we hire 5 tech leads in September and 11 in October? What is the ROI on each tool, platform, search string and reach out style we employ?
Human: It goes further than quantifiable data. Reading posts by other Andelans can motivate more than general incentives. Stepping back from your screen and meeting Andelans is special. Informal lunch introductions (‘Brown Bags’) are inadvertently moving reminders of what humans can endure and accomplish. Recruiters can unassumingly play down the profound effect that a talented, deeply aligned hire can make on an organization. Spending time with hires post-signing isn’t only an incredible way to learn, it’s deeply impactful. We blocked time to make this possible. The incredibly diverse range of people that we meet daily fuel creativity, inspiration, and a constant desire to evolve (while keeping out grit).
Iterate for Tomorrow
After the formation of our team in August 2017, we went on to hire 21 technical team leads in the coming quarter — a 404% quarterly increase.
We still have a long journey ahead of us. Next items on our to-do list include:
-An overhauled internal mobility program
-Recruiter-specific surveys from candidates
-Recruiter-specific surveys from Hiring Managers and Country Directors
-Tracking of quality of hires (performance and longevity)
Quality of hires will allow us to correlate interview performance with employee performance, and perhaps further break down how to hire the best mentors, developers, trainers and leaders.
This is our origin story. Not quite a spaceship from Krypton or as seamless as being bitten by a radioactive spider, but this is only our first chapter. We’ve recently evolved to ‘Talent Acquisition Africa’ — taking on all Africa-based staff hiring at Andela, and joining a rockstar Talent team of 40+ Andelans (handling global Staff hiring, developer/Fellowship hiring and Bootcamp assessments).
Please send us your feedback so we can keep growing. This is Andela. Our story has just begun :)
