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.