This archive report was first published on 1 July 2020.
On July 1, 2020, Andela, a global talent company, made a significant move by announcing it will now accept engineers from all African countries. This decision comes after the company went fully remote, allowing it to expand its reach and tap into a broader pool of talent.
According to Jeremy Johnson, Andela co-founder and CEO, the company has become experts at identifying engineering excellence from non-traditional backgrounds. He believes that opportunity should not be limited by proximity to a major tech hub, and that being a remote-first engineering organization allows Andela to open up access to engineers across the continent.
Andela works with top companies such as Cloudflare, Wellio, ViacomCBS, and Women Who Code to hire software engineers who work as long-term, embedded team members. The firm says going fully remote will further enable it to have better teams with diversity of experiences and technology stacks.
By removing restrictions on location, Andela aims to double its pool of potential talent to the roughly 500,000 engineers in Africa who can now leverage the platform to work with top international engineering teams.
Launched in 2014, Andela operated physical operations in Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda, and Rwanda. Today, the firm has shifted to be fully-remote, which began with pilots in Ghana in 2018 and Egypt in 2019. Accepting engineers from outside the capital cities in these countries allowed Andela to select and work with a broader range of top-tier technical talent, with no reduction in productivity.
