Many African businesses are grappling with the strain of finding the right engineers to join their teams. TestGorilla estimates that there are about 40 million unfilled technical job roles globally, showing an issue of competence even with a large pool of engineering talent available globally.
Hiring is one of the most critical tasks a business leader faces. Trust me, you cannot afford mistakes in the hiring process. You will lose time and money when you exhaust your recruitment process and end up hiring resume exaggerators.
How do you ensure you hire the right African Engineers for your teams? This article answers this question in detail.
PS: Do you have great product ideas and need a technical team to build them? You can save time and money by hiring pre-qualified intermediate and senior software engineering and product talents at Tribesquare.
First, hiring African Software Engineers comes with several advantages, just as it has its peculiar challenges. In the following sections, we will explore these advantages and challenges, as well as the strategies you should adopt to hire the right African Engineers for your teams.
Advantages of Hiring Software Engineers from Africa
Hiring African Engineers for your teams comes with some exciting benefits, which include the following:
It Is Cost Effective: African developers typically offer high-quality software development at a fraction of the cost you get when working with their counterparts from Europe and America. While developers in the USA charge anywhere between $50 - $100 per hour, African Developers charge between $10 - $30 per hour. This can save your business a lot of money.
Technical Expertise: African Software Engineers are popular for their high technical expertise as they are trained by reputable institutions globally.
Problem-Solving Ability: Africa is a third-world continent with many problems. Hence, African software engineers are trained to build solutions to critical issues faced by the people. This solution-driven mindset builds enough mental muscle to solve complex software problems.
Motivation: African Engineers usually have high morale, are highly motivated, and are willing to work. Putting their hands on the hard stuff is not foreign to African developers.
Time-Zone Advantage: Most African time zones overlap American and European time zones, giving companies extended business hours. This can improve productivity. Interestingly, African developers are independent thinkers and require little supervision to get things done.
Ethics: Africa as a continent is known for its high regard for ethics. Software Engineers from the continent are not exempted. Hence, they bring a higher ethical compass, including an excellent work ethic, to every team they belong to.
However, even with these advantages, finding and hiring African Engineering talents can be difficult due to the following challenges:
Challenges of Hiring Software Engineers from Africa
The major challenges you face when hiring African Software Engineers include:
- Talent Shortage: According to a report by the Africa Developer Ecosystem, released by Google and Accenture, there are only about 716,000 professional developers in Africa, compared to over 5.7 million in Europe and 4.1 million in the USA, as reported by Evans Data Corporation. This clearly captures the talent shortage in Africa.
Again, most experienced Engineers from Africa are selective about the companies they work with, leaving recruiters and hiring managers with a shrunk pool of talents.
Hence, to attract the right Engineers from Africa, you must promote a positive brand image and have an efficient recruitment process.
- Exaggerated/Bloated Resumes: Closely related to the talent shortage is that some less experienced Engineers sometimes exaggerate the information and experience level on their resumes. This can mislead recruiters unless you have a highly effective recruitment process.
However, even with these challenges, you can hire the right African Engineers for your teams if you adopt the right strategies.
How do You Hire the Right Engineering Talent from Africa?
When you recruit the wrong person, your business suffers, but when you hire the right person to fill your vacancies, your entire team improves.
Here are the strategies to hire the right Engineers from Africa:
- Create a Hiring Plan
To recruit the best engineering team, you must focus on the end goal and target. What product do you intend to build? What skill set do you need to create those products?
The answers to these questions will help you understand the talents and experience level you need and how to structure the interviews.
- Draft a Comprehensive Software Engineering Job Description
When you identify the required skill set and experience level needed to build your product, the next task is translating the requirements into a concise job description.
Drafting a great job description ensures you attract only the people with the skill set you need. The job description is also a benchmark when reviewing applications and interviewing candidates. It ensures that you do not go below the minimum criteria you stated.
A good job description should include the following:
An overview of the role.
The responsibilities that a candidate should expect if they get hired. In particular, mention the products or features the candidates will work on and how success is measured in that role.
The requirements/eligibility criteria that interested candidates must fulfill. The requirements should include the Technical skills, level of experience needed, Technical background, niches that interested candidates should have worked in, and soft skills.
Please make sure the requirements you list are realistic. You cannot expect to hire a developer who can comfortably work with five different programming languages or a developer with 10 years of experience in a Tech stack that came into use 5 years ago.
Optionally, you can include plus skills or other abilities that make candidates stand out among the crowd of applicants.
Specify the job location. Will the new hire work in your office in Abuja? Will the role be hybrid or fully remote? If fully remote, are there specific countries or time zones you wish to hire from?
Once you have drafted an excellent job description, publish it on your careers page and consider how to reach a larger talent pool.
- Expand The Talent Pool/Share Your Vacancy To Reach More Qualified Candidates
You must ensure that your job advertisement reaches as many talents as possible. You cannot just leave the job description on your careers page.
Share your vacancies on your social media handles, especially LinkedIn and Twitter.
You can also submit to job boards to reach thousands of people. Popular job boards frequently visited by African developers include LinkedIn Jobs, Indeed, Glassdoor, Wellfound, Crunchboard, and RemoteOk.
However, you should understand that job postings on most job boards are not free. Hence, you should make an adequate spending budget for it.
Finally, you can also use paid Ads to enhance a wider reach. Companies like Draft(dot)dev always promote their job vacancies on Twitter using paid Ads.
- Define The Interview Process
Once you share your job vacancy with prospects and start receiving applications, the next stage is to map out a plan for interviews. The steps to do this include:
a. Establish a Timeline for the interview: How much time will you and the reviewers spend reviewing applications, interviewing candidates, and conducting related tests?
b. Select Your Interviewers: Identify and notify those who will be part of your interview panel. The interviewers must be experts or people with significant experience in the niche or field you are hiring for.
I mean, you can’t invite a YouTuber to interview candidates for a software development role.
c. Set Interview Questions and Recruitment Tasks: Discuss with interview panel members and outline questions to be asked during the interviews. The interview questions must be straightforward so the candidates won’t be stuck.
Also, draw a scoring chart and assign weight to different sections of the interview. For instance, you can assign 60% to technical skills, 10% to relevant experience, 5% to Communication skills, 5% to composure and confidence, etc. This will ensure consistency in grading.
d. Use Role-Specific Skills Tests: You should use role-specific skills assessment tests that evaluate candidates based on the particular role and stack they are being interviewed for.
e. Use Multi-Measure Talent Assessment: Adopt assessment systems that test the technical skills and other skills needed to succeed in the role. Some of these skills include:
o Technical Skills test
o Cognitive ability test
o Personality and Culture fit test
o Situational judgment tests and
o Language test
f. Structure the Interviews: Decide the different interview stages you will adopt before selecting a candidate.
Also, define what you would be testing during the different stages. The first interview may test technical abilities, while the second focuses on soft and analytical skills.
Will there be a test in between the different interview stages? When will the decision to proceed with candidates be taken?
Most recruitment teams decide whether to proceed with a candidate after each stage of the interview, while some wait until all the interviews are completed before making a decision.
These decisions give clear guidelines on how to conduct the interviews.
After defining and structuring your interview, invite qualified candidates and conduct the interview.
- Conduct Interviews
Once the stage is set for the interview, invite qualified candidates at the scheduled times for thorough checks on their fit and technical skills.
Below are essential things to note while conducting technical interviews:
All interviewers should introduce themselves, especially their names and roles.
Provide information about the interview's schedule, length, and format.
Be patient and respectful to the candidates. Always rephrase questions if the candidates request it.
Allow candidates to ask questions. Interestingly, the questions the candidates ask can offer insights into the thought process of such candidates.
Pay attention to any wrong signals during the interviews. Is the candidate’s communication off? Were they late for the interview? These attitudes can signal a red flag that can guide your decisions, especially when you have other candidates who also had great interviews.
Exhibit a Positive Brand Identity. Ensure that you communicate a positive brand image to your prospective hires. You can do this by talking about your company values and goals, benefits and extra rewards programs, your corporate social responsibility projects, and the learning and development opportunities in your business.
- Make Your Final Decision and Extend an Offer to Successful Candidates
After concluding the interview process, weigh the performances against the eligibility criteria you set earlier. Also, consider which of the top candidates best fits your organization’s ambitions and purpose.
Make objective decisions and extend an offer to successful candidates via email.
After Recruitment, What Next?
After hiring engineers for your Engineering team, two main tasks await:
- Gathering Recruitment Data: At the end of the entire process, it is wise to gather data related to the recruitment process.
How many applications did you receive for the vacancy?
What percentage of total applicants met the eligibility criteria?
How many candidates fulfilled all requirements and passed all interviews?
Were there any candidates who declined the offer? If yes, why?
How was the new hire's performance after their first 3 and 6 months?
These data will help you make more informed decisions in subsequent recruitment processes.
- How Do You Motivate Your New Engineers to Build and Ship High-Quality Products On Time?
Another major task is getting your new engineers to work, managing the team to be successful, and getting them to build high-quality products and ship them on time.
This can be tasking, especially if you have little experience managing teams of this nature.
However, if you want to save yourself the stress of hiring, building and managing technical teams, Tribesquare’s Team management services can help.
Reach out to Tribesquare to learn more about how the company can help you build your technical teams and launch great products.
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