How to Find and Recruit Top Talent Outside Your Network
Venture for Africa Co-founder Tobi Lafinhan sat down with Alex Dobyan, Data Analytics Manager at Sokowatch, to learn more about how his team uses VFA to find and recruit exceptional talent that can hit the ground running.
Tell us a bit about you, your company and your role there.
My name is Alex Dobyan, I manage the data analytics team at Sokowatch.
Sokowatch is an e-commerce platform that provides services to shopkeepers throughout low-income areas and urban East Africa. The primary thing we do is that we have a platform to connect manufacturers and distributors in the fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) sector with these shops so that shop owners can procure inventory for their stores, and then we handle deliveries.
We also are expanding into value-added services for shops — for example, financial services that give these shopkeepers access to credit.
We’ve had a host of initiatives and pilots in the past, and we’re definitely always looking to expand the kind of services that we can provide to small, informal shops throughout our customer base.
How long have you been at Sokowatch, and why did you join the team?
I have been at Sokowatch for two years.
Shortly before I joined Sokowatch, I moved to Nairobi from the US. I wanted to work at a startup in Africa, and the plan was to use my time in Nairobi to try to connect with people in the startup space.
Through a friend, I got connected with a different early-stage startup and gained a little bit of experience through a short-term internship there before I got introduced to someone at Sokowatch
(Alex’s experience, in theory, was his own version of VFA where he got the opportunity to explore working with a startup, get immersed in the ecosystem, build a network, before taking a full leap to join a high-growth team like Sokowatch. Our mission at VFA is to make such a pathway that much more accessible)
I was attracted to the problem side of trying to figure out how to do everything that we do right now at Sokowatch — things like “how do you sort out the logistics of delivery?”, “What shops should we lend to?”, and so on. I wanted to be able to learn how the sausages were made and eventually use my experience within data to make all of that work more efficiently and give my colleagues insight.
That was where Sokowatch and I had a “meeting of the minds,” and then I basically progressed from doing a consultancy with them into a full-time job, which is where I am today.
How does hiring currently work at Sokowatch?
When I first joined, the People team at Sokowatch didn’t exist!
However, today we have a people team that really works to help the rest of the organisation manage hiring processes.
Based on whatever needs there are, hiring managers will submit a JD to the people team and then they help us out with recruitment, getting the word out about the position, and then figuring out the process of sequencing e.g if we wanted to run certain types of interviews, technical evaluations, assessments etc.
From there they also help with communicating the offer and with onboarding.
So why Venture for Africa?
For me, the main thing was that our CEO Daniel Yu was very excited about the idea, and because the formal hiring process can take longer (mostly because you’re hiring someone for an indefinite position), in the beginning, we were interested to see if VFA would be a source of good candidates and a way to find interesting people with interesting skillsets that we might not otherwise have come across.
That’s where it started, and that led to having Wanjiku Kimani join as our first fellow, as well as Nabila Amarsy and Angelina Ndung’u who ended up joining us full-time after the fellowship.
We really had a good experience with Wanjiku even in the middle of a pandemic and working remotely, so that made us decide to take on another fellow, Dennis Chang’ach, in the following VFA cohort.
How did you find the process of working with Venture for Africa?
I think the shortlisting process was a huge help! We had the top candidates presented to us without having to comb through hundreds of applications and weed out unqualified candidates or candidates without the right experience.
I think having such access to high-quality candidates from the start really helped us figure out exactly what we wanted.
What was the experience like working with your most recent fellow from Venture for Africa?
Dennis was very strong.
He had a very interesting background because he had done some work as a founder before. He also had a software background but had taken some data science courses, so he was kind of an all-rounder, and that was good because it turned out to be what we needed.
During the time that Dennis was with us, we had a lot of different projects that we needed him to step in on without a lot of notice and fix things where we needed a spare hand, and that turned out to be something that he was very great at.
On the flip side, what were some of the challenges you faced?
With anyone that joins Sokowatch, I think in general they first need to learn how everything works because there are so many moving parts, and there is a lot that goes into how decisions are made and how we execute certain processes. So getting a new person up to speed (VFA fellow or not) is always a challenge.
Then specifically in Dennis’ case, he hadn’t worked on a data team before, so he wasn’t as familiar with some of the technical tools that we used. But that was fine because every organisation has their own tech stack, and we were looking more for someone who we thought would be a quick learner.
In the beginning, there was a little bit of hand-holding to show him how things worked, but he was able to really adapt quickly and catch on, which was great for us to have someone that could get up to speed that quickly.
If you have a job description for a role or business problem that you want to tackle, so far, VFA has shown a pretty good intuition to be able to take that and find someone within its pool of candidates that will be able to make an impact in a fast-growing startup. — Alex Dobyan (Data Analytics Manager, Sokowatch)
A word to future teams/hiring managers considering working with VFA?
The nice thing about Venture for Africa (VFA) is that you are good at finding people, who regardless of their background, are both excited about working for a startup in Africa and have the ability to do what you need to do in a startup — which is whatever problem you’re facing, just destroy it, make it go away!
Not everyone has that level of hustle or problem-solving ability, and both times with VFA, we were able to find someone from the shortlist that we felt was going to be able to handle such problems. So far, it has been the candidates that VFA had already rated 5 stars for us. We’ve picked that 5-star candidate each time, and it hasn’t gone wrong yet!
If you have a job description for a role or business problem that you want to tackle, so far, VFA has shown a pretty good intuition to be able to take that and find someone within its pool of candidates that will be able to make an impact in a fast-growing startup.
I’ve found working with VFA better than sorting through the hundreds of resumes I’d get for a position on my team, and interviewing all the candidates myself.
VFA cuts out the bottom half of the pyramid and then presents you with the tip of the pyramid, which makes the whole process a lot easier!
