Just joined the tech cabal community. The site was recommended to me by a friend who lives in Lagos. I am currently based in the United States, but in the process of venturing into the Nigerian startup scene. I am still updating my profile so please bare with me.
I want to get an idea of the hiring process in Nigeria and how I can go about recruiting very experience developers with a strong Computer Science background. We’ve tried Jobberman as well as newspaper ads. The quality of candidates received was very poor. Is there a more efficient process that can possible weed out the really bad resumes.
Over here we can recruit from specific universities or attend career fairs with candidates that have been vetted. Does anything like this exist in Lagos? Please feel free to share your experience hiring developers in Lagos. I am going to post the role in this site shortly. We are basically looking for a full stack developer with a lot of experience using some of the common open source frameworks - Spring/Hibernate/MySQL on the back end and ExtJS on the front end. looking forward to any feedback I can get.
If the world is truly global, why are you focusing on finding your developer in Nigeria? Costs? Why not setup shop in the US, UK or Russia? Or do you need the developers to code in Yoruba?
The world is global but the best products are built based on collaborative physical discussions.
Unless your expectations do not require feedback. But if it does and that’s the case for most start ups then you better off with someone you can bounce ideas off
@Tola There are some jobs that require a very good understanding of the target market.
@oea101 The best programmers/developers in Nigeria have full time job (and a lot of side jobs as to do list). This is the primary reason why Nigerian developers are unreliable. They have too much on their plates and only give attention to who’s paying the most. You will be lucky to get an experience programmer straight out of the university especially in Nigeria where CS is mostly theory. Andela I suppose should be your best bet.
Your best bet in hiring local developers of high quality is with Andela. I do not know their supply level (of resident developers) nor their pricing.
Alternatively, you can organize a few days hackathon. In the invitation, clearly indicate the qualities you seek in interested attendees, emphasize that it will be hands-on and state the rewards too. With that, I think you’ll succeed in finding what you’re looking for.
Thanks for the response. I’ll check out codeplus software academy. I heard about Andela, but I was under the impression their main clients were Fortune 500 companies. @Tola there are trade-offs to managing a distributed vs co-located team. A company typically determines its staffing model based on the cost and complexity associated with the product, among other factors. Our current project requires a good balance of both. I’ll recommend you read up on the Agile methodology and some of the efficiency gains that can be achieved by having a co-located team.
