How I: Find; screen; and hire developers Video Lecture | "How I" by Google Developers - IT & Software

DALE HUMBY: My name is Dale.
I am the CTO of Nomanini Mobile.
And we build Point of Sale
Terminals for emerging markets,
mostly in Africa, to sell
prepaid electricity, air time,
and water.
So today I'm going to talk about
how Nomanini hires developers.
Finding developers in
Cape Town is incredibly
challenging for a startup.
There's a lot of big
companies around who
are snapping up all the
good, talented people.
And as a startup without the
name brand of these bigger
companies, or more
established firms,
it's difficult to get
people to join us.
The developers are the makers
of, certainly, a technology
company.
The developers and
engineers are the guys
who are building the product
that the sales team sells
and that our customers want.
The way that we build
our development pipeline,
or rather, the way we
build our hiring pipeline,
is-- there's two parts to it.
We've got the junior
developers who
we find at the
local universities
through talent
programs, I suppose,
and internship programs.
University of Cape
Town, particularly,
has a program called
Break The Rules.
And they invite local tech
companies to go and present
to the students.
And then the students give us
their CVs and we hire them.
And every year we take
on three developers
in the middle of the
year, the winter vacation,
and another two or three
during the summer vac.
And that's been very
successful in building
a pipeline for new developers.
For more senior or
experienced guys,
we use our personal network.
So myself and the other
guys in the company
have all got friends
who are generally
within the tech space.
So we put our art
and social media
that we're looking for
people to join our team.
Otherwise we use
recruitment agents,
and we've had a bit of
success with that, as well.
As a startup sometimes
it's difficult to convince
a developer to join a
startup, mostly because it's
less established than some
of the bigger companies
in Cape Town.
So it's a little bit more risky.
Or so we can't necessarily
compete on salary
that some of the bigger
corporates can pay.
So what we really sell the
developers on who want to join
us is our vision.
So they can join our company
and really define the product
that we're building.
With a small team of six
people-- in the early days
it was just two or
three of us-- we
have a huge impact
on what you can do.
We have a very
cross-functional team.
So you don't have a
front-end developer
and a back-end developer,
or a firmware and hardware
developer.
We expect the guys to be able to
develop right across the stack.
So everything from
the hardware, if they
need to implement a feature,
right up to the front
end that the dashboards need.
Our hiring process has
got five steps to it.
The first bit is
receiving the CV.
Then we have an email
screening, as well,
where I get to introduce
myself, and Nomanini,
and what we do, and ask for
a little bit of information
about the person who
would like to join us--
what is their current role,
what are some of the projects
that they've worked on,
what do they really want out
of their career, why are they
looking to change jobs-- just
to get an idea of who they are
and what they want out of it
and see whether
Nomanini can offer that.
The next stage is a telephone
or hang-out screening
that I do with them.
Just a basic interview,
ask some general questions
about them and their history.
We do a coding example,
as well, over Google Docs
so I can see what they're typing
and understand how they do It.
And a little bit of a
creativity question, as well,
to just kind of get an
idea of how they think.
After that, I've finished my
part of the interview process
and hand them over
to the dev team.
And it's up to the developers
to interview their peers.
And it's something we
believe very strongly,
and that it's not up to
management to do the hiring,
but it's up to the
team to hire people
that they want to work with.
So the developers, we invite
the candidate in to interview
with us.
It's two or three devs
sit in on the interview.
Ask them some coding questions,
perhaps some more creativity,
some thinking questions
just to, once again,
understand the scope
of their knowledge,
and also whether
they're going to make
a good fit with the team.
And assuming they get
through that process,
the final step, which is
all about the cultural fit,
is inviting them to
our office to work
for a half day or a full
day with us to sit and do
pay programming on
production code,
that we can see what
it's like to have them
on the team with us.
If we're going to be working
10 hours a day together,
we want to know that
they're going to fit in
well with our existing team.
When we hired our first
or second employee
we were able to tap into
our personal networks.
But after you've
hired those guys,
there's not a whole
lot of your friends
that are looking to change jobs.
So you very quickly run out
of your personal network
to get recruits.
So we've looked further
afield, and that's probably
been the biggest change is
looking up in Johannesburg
and Pretoria for
people to join us--
and trying to figure out
how you do interviews
and recruiting
without necessarily
meeting the person until
towards the end of the process.
I guess we've refined
our interview process
over the last two
or three years.
It started off with we're so
pleased that somebody wanted
to join us that we hired them.
But that's not necessarily
the right decision.
And we've been a
lot more diligent
about having a formal process,
and keeping the questions
from interview to interview the
same so we know how to gauge.
The top people who'd
actually join the team, what
were their sort of answers?
And now how does
this other candidate
stack up against some of those
answers and the way they think?
So I guess just a little
bit more experience
has helped a lot in recruiting.
For us, the hiring
process can be very long.
And I'm talking about, not
necessarily the recruiting
like we're looking for
someone now, but from the time
we see an intern, perhaps,
in their second year
of university.
By the time they've
done their fourth year
and then they're looking
for a job, that's
two years have gone by
that we need to keep
them warm during that period.
There's other people that
have interviewed with us who
we ultimately didn't take on.
But because that interviewing
process was a good one for them
and they enjoyed it,
they recommended us
to some of their friends
who then did join us.
So we've had at
least two people who
recommended one of their
friends to join our company.
So building that pipeline--
although if you're recruiting
it's not immediate,
kind of always
having that on the back burner,
looking for good employees,
is important.
Because it does take
years before someone
you first speak to them to
when they may be changing jobs
and they want to join you.
We try and limit
the amount of people
that we onboard to one a month.
That's just because
if you suddenly-- we
found, through some
of our colleagues
who've grown their companies
very fast that onboarding
more than one person a month
really disrupts the culture.
And by the time you've got
that person settled in,
we've found that
the learning curve
for them is anywhere
between three
to six months until
they're fully up to speed.
So getting more
than a few people
joining your team
during that time
takes a huge load
on the existing team
to up-skill these guys.
When we first started
Nomanini, our CEO
was very keen for us to
build a development team,
build a product, and then
they would sell the product
and they don't need
engineers anymore.
I always have taken the
vision that we are developing
a minimum viable
product, and you
want to iterate on that product,
that it's never finished.
So having a team is
really important.
And to me that means the team
should be an internal team.
If you're a technology
company building a product,
I don't believe you can
outsource that development,
either to a local company or
to, perhaps, companies in India
or the Far East.
I believe if you want
to do something properly
you need to do it yourself,
and find the right people who
are sitting together in the same
room developing that product
that meets your vision.
And that's how we hire
talent at Nomanini.
Thanks very much.