Scaling your tech team can come at a high price tag if you’re paying individual success fees for every hire. This becomes an even bigger pain when you’re scaling your team from scratch in a new region.
This was the problem Equal Experts faced as they opened an office in the country, and had a high demand for developers in South Africa in the wake of the pandemic. Here’s how they were able to hire 32 developers for their South African office through OfferZen, and significantly saved on hiring costs with a subscription.
Equal Experts is an agile consultancy, with offices in the UK, US, Europe, India and Australia — they first expanded their office in South Africa in 2018. When remote work became increasingly popular and accepted after the pandemic, Equal Experts saw the demand for talented developers in South Africa increase among their international clients who were now hiring across borders.
Faced with this pressure, the team needed to rapidly scale their tech team in South Africa and still meet their hiring budget.
Here’s how OfferZen was able to help them reach their goals by solving the following challenges:
Saving on hiring costs with a subscription
Equal Experts were on the lookout for an alternative to the individual placement fees they paid when hiring through recruitment agencies:
“We were not comfortable paying the high placement fees. Recruitment agencies have very high hiring fees, some as high as 20-25%, and on top of that they didn't really understand our tech requirements. We were wasting our time going through CVs agencies were sending us,” says Liezl Kritzinger, Recruitment Lead at Equal Experts.
Given their ambitious growth goals and the number of developers they hired, they were able to reduce these costs by signing up for a hiring subscription on OfferZen.
“We have definitely saved a lot of money in partnering with OfferZen. We had unlimited hires for this year at a set amount which has significantly impacted our cost per hire,” says Liezl. “A subscription made financial sense to us, it was low risk.”
On an OfferZen subscription, you can make unlimited developer hires and avoid paying individual, varying hiring fees for every hire.
Finding the right technical fit with OfferZen profiles
“On platforms like LinkedIn there’s not a lot of information, whereas on OfferZen it’s very transparent which tech stacks developers have experience in,” says Liezl.
With traditional hiring channels, the Equal Experts team struggled to get access to enough information to make decisions on whether a developer would be a good match for their requirements. In contrast, OfferZen offers a range of filtering options that allow users to search for tech stack, remote work preferences, years of experience with a particular skill and more.
“Before using OfferZen, we'd approach candidates completely out of our range or without the right experience. Having access to details like tech stack and salary expectations on OfferZen helps us not to waste that time.”
In this way, they were able to find developers with the technical skills they needed. “The quality of hires from OfferZen is far better than any other platform we tried in terms of technical experience,” says Shosho Tichareva, People Manager in Tech Hiring at Equal Experts.
The team at Equal Experts highlights some details on candidates' profiles on OfferZen that helped them hire the right developers:
- What candidates are looking for in their next job
- Skillset summary
- Upfront salary expectations
- Detailed location preferences
Liezl also mentions that with access to candidates on OfferZen, they found it easier to meet their Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) goals and hire more women developers.
Matching with developers that have job-seeking intent
Another way the team was able to make their process more efficient was by gaining access to actively job-seeking developers:
“The great thing with approaching candidates on OfferZen is that they’re active in the market, versus passive talent on LinkedIn,” says Liezl.
“When you’re on LinkedIn, you’ll probably reach out to dozens of people but get little response. Your time investment is a lot more than on OfferZen.”
Access to benchmarking data to make informed hiring decisions
Access to fresh benchmarking data is crucial when putting together your hiring strategy for the year. The team at Equal Experts were able to access hard-to-find benchmarking data in the South African market with the help of their OfferZen Account Manager, Estine van der Berg. Account Managers at OfferZen help companies hire the right talent by advising on successful hiring strategies, and share benchmark data and best practices:
“When you’re hiring, there isn’t a lot of data out there. You get access to this on OfferZen, and that’s great — you can compare your response rates, time to hire, and so forth. When you do your internal reporting, you have a benchmark you can use. You can see what the average company is doing, and do better,” says Liezl.
In addition, their Account Manager could help them identify the best candidates for their hiring needs, and were continuously available to check in on each candidate process:
“OfferZen not only gives access to quality candidates, but also to a great human service. Our Account Manager helps us understand the candidates better, and can double check some important details like what they're looking for, and how we can make competitive offers,” Liezl adds.
The results
Ultimately, the team at Equal Experts hired 32 developers to date on OfferZen, hiring 10 people for their team in 2023 alone.
“Without a doubt, OfferZen helped us achieve our growth plans. We’ve doubled in size since the pandemic,” says Liezl.
What’s more, they’ve retained most of their hires and achieved a low attrition rate. “That speaks to the fact that we’ve been hiring the right quality candidates,” adds Liezl.
Similarly, the developers they’ve hired on OfferZen attests to finding a workplace that fits them:
“Everyone at Equal Experts assumes that everyone else is smart, creative and open to new ways of thinking. Empathy is probably the cultural cornerstone — it’s not about being the smartest in the room, it’s about what each of us can bring to solve a problem” says Riaz Arbi, Senior Data Engineer at Equal Experts.
“Even in the interview process, it’s clear that they care about finding the right person for the team. Technical skills are important, but not enough. All in all it left me with the impression that they get it right — the quality of the organisational culture attests to that.”
Are you hiring software developers? OfferZen is a curated developer hiring marketplace that connects job-seeking developers with exciting opportunities at over 2000 companies in South Africa and beyond.
Hiring teams can make unlimited hires across all the roles on OfferZen, saving up to 50% compared to traditional recruitment costs.