Do you want to find out more about Andela and realize whether they are a trustworthy partner for hiring software engineers? You’re in the right place. Below you will find answers to all questions you may have about Andela: how the company works with clients, how it was founded, the main features of the company, whether they treat their employees well, and if clients are satisfied with the service.
Andela’s target customers are tech companies and startups looking for remote developers, product managers, and designers. If you can relate — this section is for you. Here you can discover products, services, how Andela works with clients, and what it charges, as well as its advantages and disadvantages.
Companies and enterprises from the USA often consider working with Andela. Let’s find out whether it’s a great idea for them, looking specifically at its advantages and disadvantages.
They claim to hire the best developers and to have a system that does so, supposedly well. Their rigorous vetting process includes previous screening, psychometric tests, and pair programming exercises, and this is just a part of it. They receive around 25,000 applicants annually and hire just a tiny amount of 0,5% of them.
Extremely high expertise of engineers from the earlier batches of developers. Remember we talked previously about the Fellowship program? The one that was an intense and complete 4-year program for junior engineers that raised them into really skilled professionals. If you get an engineer who attended this program, you are extra lucky.
Number of professionals in the talent pool. Andela company has more than 175,000 engineers, designers, and product managers in its community. Given the meticulous vetting process each has undergone, there’s a great chance that somewhere among them is a perfect candidate for you.
They work only with long-term contracts. Thus you won’t be able to hire a freelancer for an ad-hoc or a part-time project.
May be lacking senior developers. Though they had a great educational program to raise seniors for some time, there was a gap during which few senior developers entered the company. Only recently, they’ve shifted to hiring senior developers.
Andela’s pricing is not low. It instead has the pricing of market leaders. If your budget is not essential, Andela is probably not the partner you are looking for.
There are a lot of Andela reviews you can find coming from people they hire, but not enough reviews coming from companies. This may alert you when you are exploring the market and need help finding enough information. But we’ve found some relevant ones and are ready to share them with you.
Companies like Andela tend to conceal their packages rate for higher involvement of potential clients in the communication, as there are no other ways to discover their pricing. However, we have some information to share with you.
In 2020, Forbes reported Andela’s revenue to vary from $50,000 to $120,000 per developer. That means that one would pay around $4,000 for hiring a software engineer associate, but if you are looking for a full-time developer-price would rise to $12,000 per month. And let’s keep in mind that for the past two years, prices have increased by 10-20% or even more for highly qualified professionals.
This pricing can suit bigger businesses and enterprises, while for startups and small businesses, the prices are likely to be too high.
The first contact with companies representative — is the recruiter. At this stage, the candidate will go through their first interview in the company, during which the recruiter will share some additional details on the role, and the candidate will share some info about their background, skills, and qualifications. After the interview, the candidate will receive feedback. And if it is positive, they will move forward.
It is the time to speak with Hiring Manager, who will assess candidates’ skills, knowledge, and experience and see if they fit the role. If they do, at this stage, the candidate is also supposed to meet a few stakeholders to ensure core skills.
The last stage, during which Andela representatives will check if the candidate matches their values and culture. Then the candidate will be explicitly evaluated on their technical skills, critical thinking, and other significant expertise relevant to the role. Of course, each round is conducted in English, so knowledge of English is crucial for those wanting to work at the company.
You can get acquainted with Andela jobs and open positions at the site. You need to go to their careers page, choose an open role, and fill out the application form. Nothing unusual at this stage, the most interesting begins with the hiring and interviewing process described above. Here would be better for a candidate to stock up on patience, time, and persistence to go through it until the end.
Above, we have already discussed how much it costs to hire someone from a company for clients. Of course, as with Andela’s pricing for clients, they do not reveal their salaries. But people are always happy to share their compensation size anonymously at such services as glassdoor. So, According to glassdoor, a skilled software engineer would receive $150,000 on average, starting with $120,000 for middle and $217,000 for qualified seniors.
Average salaries for specific engineering roles are like that:
StartupSoft is a talent pool with thousands of Ukrainian engineers and designers who work mainly with world-class businesses and startups from Silicon Valley and the EU. Like Andela, they provide clients with full-time specialists that act as an integral part of their team.
StartupSoft’s primary qualification is to hire, manage and retain remote employees. They take care of every step in the hiring process instead of you. Startups and businesses receive full ownership, irrespective of work conditions (remote or in-house) and geography. They strive to create an in-house experience within a remote team.
Here’s what the flow of searching for a perfect specialist in your team would look like with StartupSoft:
Talking about Toptal vs Andela and StartupSoft, what differs them the most is that Toptal not only has developers, engineers, and designers on their platform but also provides a lot of non-developer professionals. Financial experts, project managers, product managers, and designers are among them.
Another feature of Toptal’s process of cooperation with employees is that they review and vet them once in a while to ensure there are no underqualified professionals on the platform. Once they discover someone’s performance goes down, they most likely will remove this person from the pool.
The hiring process at Toptal is quite extensive and includes five stages. Toptal claims that they accept to the platform only 3% of all the applicants, as it is not easy to make it to the end if you are not qualified enough.
Compared to Andela, Toptal is much more transparent when talking about pricing. And they have an interesting scheme for starting the cooperation in terms of payments. For the first two weeks of the developers’ work on the client’s team, the client has to pay an initial $500. If the candidate is unsuitable for the role, that’s it. You don’t have to pay for anything else. But if everything goes well and you decide to stick with them, this 500$ will be added to the first invoice.
Like Andela, Lemon.io specializes in developers from a particular region — in their case, Eastern Europe. Their hiring process is harsh and rigorous as they claim to have the best region’s talents in their talent pool.
To start working with Lemon.io, you have to give them a short description of your requirements and needs and then wait until the Lemon team finds the matching candidate. They guarantee to find a suitable developer in 24 hours, and usually, they succeed. If you don’t think that the developer Lemon suggests you are not the one, they will keep searching for no additional fee.
Lemon.io targets mostly startups, so if you have a middle business or enterprise, Lemon is probably not the choice. They also do not suggest relocating their developers to your office, as most work remotely. You can invite a developer to perform in-house, but all relocation expenses will be on your side.
Terminal.io is a talent pool of software engineers focused on hiring professionals in North and South America: Mexico, Colombia, and Chile, and they also have developers from Canada. Up to 90,000 developers and engineers are claimed to be available for hiring at the Terminal.
They provide pretty same services as all companies described above to help clients scale businesses by hiring qualified tech professionals. Every employer they have is already screened, tested, vetted, and interviewed several times. Terminal states that within five days after filling up the form at the site, clients review the first suggested candidate and usually hire within 45 days.
Upwork must be the most famous platform that connects freelancers of all types of qualifications with clients, as well as the first platform to do so. But for now, middle businesses and enterprises are not recommended to search for talent there. The top talents have left the platform due to the high freelancers-to-jobs ratio and, thus, low prices.
One can consider Upwork when some tasks had to be done yesterday, and no one could handle them at the moment. Urgent and straightforward assignments can be closed effectively with Upwork, but chances are you won’t find a long-term cooperation with top talents here.
If you’re looking for a reliable partner that would hand-pick top tech talent for you, we’d recommend checking out StartupSoft. We know we might
be biased, but we’re quite confident we’ll be able to make that perfect tech match for you.
Andela is a global talent marketplace where tech, fintech, and startup companies can build remote teams by hiring skilled engineers, product managers, and designers.
Andela was cofounded by six young entrepreneurs in 2014. Only one of the founders continues to work at the company nowadays — Jeremy Johnson.
In 2022, its valuation reached $1,5 billion.
Average salaries for specific engineering roles are like that:
Software Developer — $110,000
Technical team lead — $160,000
IOS Developer — $124,000
Web Developer — $100,000
QA Engineer $116,000
You can find Andela jobs that are available at the moment on the site of the company. You need to go to Andela careers page, choose an open role, and fill out the application form. Then the rigorous hiring process begins.
StartupSoft
Toptal
Lemon.io
Terminal.io
Upwork
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