[tyingq]

Sounds like a terrific idea. I saw the growth of this sort of thing in Argentina and other South American countries once some companies started investing time and money there. A fair amount of the popularity was attributed to sharing highly overlapping time zones with the US. I imagine this has a similar advantage for European customers.

You may get some mileage out of talking with Globant (https://globant.com) or a similar company in South America to hear what their experience was. They have a different model, but do a lot of the same things you've outlined.

[ilianam]

Yes! Totally right about the time zone benefits (although some of our talent is willing to adjust to US time zones, the employers rarely seem to believe it).

Also true about the fact that this sort of thing has sprouted in other regions, including South/Latin America. We've been trying to connect with them & share lessons learned because we think there's a big need in this space & we should all help each other succeed. I'm not sure I understand how Globant is similar to us though, is it an agency?

The ones we've spoken to so far that are pretty similar to ours (last-mile prep for job placement) include: PestoTech (engineers in India), PAZ.AI (refugees in Europe), Shift.org (veterans in USA), Insight Fellows (data science in USA), Talently.Tech (devs in LatAm), Laboratoria (women in LatAm), Outtalent (devs in Eastern Europe).

So far it seems to me that they're not far ahead of us, but nevertheless they've made enough progress to share some important lessons. First, it's important to start with and maintain quality. Quality for candidates means getting a job that's much better than what they would've gotten on their own, within 2-6 months of meeting our requirements. On the demand side, quality means that candidates meet or exceed the expectations of their standard talent selection process and performance post hire. Second, it's important to take a talent-first approach because that's what attracts the top talent. This includes being careful not to charge the talent an unreasonable rate. Employers may not all pay for the talent at the beginning when we're establishing our reputation, but ultimately that's where the main financial opportunity is - and charging a subscription fee ensures long-term mutually beneficial relationships.

Of course there's also the outsourcing agency/staff augmentation model that has existed for decades in Eastern Europe and South Asia... Andela is a more recent/visible example in Africa. Those are more easily profitable, but we've avoided that approach for now because we see that the top engineers prefer to work directly for great companies (whether remotely or on-site) and it is more beneficial for their career growth to do so.

[tyingq]

"how Globant is similar to us though"

Their business model isn't similar, but their methods are. They are a development house, somewhat similar to say, ThoughtWorks. But, they spend a lot of time with new hires, many straight from university, training them. Not just technically, but "US business speak/culture", helping them with the CV that's presented to potential clients, understanding schtick-of-the-day stuff like "Scaled Agile" and so on. And client-specific training, like how to speak FinTech, Insurance, Airline, or whatever.

[ilianam]

Gotcha! That's great (and a good reminder for us to reconnect with ThoughtWorks too :) We'll have to see if Globant would be willing to share some lessons learned with us.

One of the problems we noticed in the Middle East & North Africa is a lack of agencies / development houses that do this at a high quality. In Eastern Europe lots of people go from college into a dev house for 2 years, and then qualify for great remote jobs (which usually require at least 2 years of experience).

We believe there's value to getting talent straight into the top tech companies, and that we will be able to develop a more scalable approach to teaching them these skills (communities are powerful & scale quickly). But it can be a challenge to get companies to hire engineers that have just graduated from college and have no work experience, so we'll need to find solutions to that. One approach that is working well for us is internships. Companies like Google have great programs and our talent has been doing really well interviewing for those opportunities.