Recruiting in Africa

"I bless the rains down in Africa"

For anyone recruiting in Africa I wanted to share some learnings and celebrate what great fun it is.

I have dealt with candidates and recruited in most parts of the world but never had the pleasure of focusing and building teams in Africa. For context I am recruiting Backend Software Engineering and Finance roles.

The candidates are plentiful and willing, they are great to connect with and I have noticed a much higher number of female engineers coming through than I’ve seen in Europe or the US.

If you are thinking of hiring remote teams in Africa then be prepared!

• There is an explosion of great talent that seems to have gone off around 2018/19/20, this means tons of mid level to senior engineers with modern stack experience.

• You will need a good ATS (I’m biased towards one get in touch if you want to know more) to handle the volume, as an example 1 advert for a mid level .net engineer in Lagos produced over 600 applications in month 1.

• When sourcing you can’t just look for buzzwords like facebook, google and apple thinking it’s a shortcut to great candidates. This is old school sourcing, read the profiles and do the research on the companies in the locations. There are not tens of thousands of new startups in this region.

• People move companies often, gigs are seemingly short term. This is driven by two factors, short term sprints consultancy style where the candidates are contractors and secondly the thirst for knowledge and skills from the candidates themselves.

• The amount of ghosting and no-shows is much less than everywhere else I have recruited ever.

• The level of English language skills is very high, again second only to actual English speaking countries.

This is a snapshot of an ecosystem that is maturing very fast. Within the next 10 years I would see most of the remote skills shortages in Europe being filled with Africans. Tell me I’m wrong, I already see a few household names hiring in the region and once Europe and the US shake off their current woes this will blow up.