CodeLn

Recruiting Programmers is a hectic and time consuming process, recruiter risk having a bad hire if recruitment is not properly conducted. Programmers on the other hand are either unemployed or underemployed in Africa. CodeLn helps recruiters to find their ideal dev and connects programmers to their dream job. It is our vision to become the global go-to marketplace for finding skilled tech talent in Africa. We are reducing the rate of unemployment of youths in Africa by connecting them to job opportunities. 

It takes an average of 3 months to fill up a key tech role. Part of the challenges that recruiters face are:

• Where to find programmers

• Quality of programmers

• Long time-to-hire

Fact is, this is a global problem, recruiting Programmers is a hectic and time consuming process. According to Technavio, the estimated spend of our target market (Nigeria & Ghana) on this problem is $34million.

On the other hand, Tech talent in Africa are either unemployed or underemployed. This discourages them from pursuing a career in tech thereby stifling innovation in Africa.

According to ISSER (Institute of Statistical, Social and Economic Research), the unemployment numbers for sub-Saharan Africa are expected to increase from 29.1 million to 31.3 million in 2019. It says unemployment among the youth; that is, persons between 15 and 24 years of age, remains much higher than among other cohorts of the labour force in most economies.

According to Linkedin, there are over 50,000 tech talent in Nigeria. This number is growing month on month because the government and non-profit organisations have formed several initiative to train youths on digital skills for free. But the missing bit is, they need to practice these skills in the real world unless the training will be irrelevant.

CodeLn's marketplace connects recruiters looking to hire tech talent to skilled African tech talent. We help our talent grow by assigning them workplace sample projects to build and add to their portfolio in order for them to have an attractive profile for recruiters.

We help recruiters seamlessly find, test and, hire Programmers. Our solution automates the entire tech recruitment process end-to-end, thereby reducing the average time-to-hire from 3 months to 2 weeks. Programmers have easy access to jobs on the platform and they can pick and be matched with jobs. 

We have 3 key features on the platform.

• Marketplace: recruiters can easily find skilled talent

• Testing tool: recruiters can verify the coding skills of talent

• ATS: recruiters can seamlessly track applicants on the platform

The solution is a web application that was built using Django, Vue and Java.

What makes CodeLn unique is our proprietary testing platform -CLIDE. We have an in-built testing platform and IDE that is used to verify the coding skills of software developers for client. This help reduce the risk of a bad hire and guarantees quality on the platform. It also detects areas for skill improvement for software developers in order to help them improve on their coding skills. 

Also, our zeal to solve this problem is driven by our passion as fellow engineers. All four co-founders have a  background in engineering, we understand that learning to code is hard, therefore anyone that has learned successfully deserves their dream job. We can all empathise with  both Recruiters and Devs because we have been in their shoes. Because of our empathy and know-how, we built a solution that addresses the problem specifically for our market and that is affordable for our market too.

During our initial market research, we contacted over 50 Programmers and over 40 prospective clients too. Their major challenges were:

Clients:

Where to find programmers

Quality of Programmers

Long time-to-hire

Programmers:

Access to qualifying jobs

Learning path

Skill improvement

Based on these feedback, we built CodeLn. We have a marketplace to help recruiters find programmers and expose programmers to qualifying jobs on the job board, we built a testing platform to measure the quality of programmers and help them improve their coding skills, by automating the entire recruitment we reduce the time-to-hire by 80%, we have a designed learning path for Programmers. With all these, our solution addresses the problem identified.

• Users: Clients( Recruiters & Programmers)

• The current number of people we’re serving: 11016

• The number we’ll be serving in one year: 20,000

• The number we’ll be serving in five years: 50,000

Goal for 1 year:

In the next one year, we will connect over 500 African Programmers to their dream jobs, fill up over 500 tech roles for Recruiters and we will help train over 1000 undergraduates on IT skills.

Goal for 5 years:

In the next 5 year, we will become the global go-to marketplace for finding skilled African Programmers. We will connect over 5000 Programmers to their dream jobs, fill up over 5000 tech roles for Recruiters and we will help train over 5000 undergraduates on IT skills.

Barriers for next one year:

For this year, the barrier is mostly centred around finances. We are working on scaling across Anglophone and Francophone Areas in West Africa but there is a limit to what can be achieved with limited funds.

Secondly, clients are slow to adopting technology for hiring. They are still used to the traditional hiring process. So we have to do a bit of education to change user behaviour and this costs time.

Barriers for next five year:

The barrier we foresee for the next 5 years is still financial. We hope to expand to more countries and increase the sales and engineering team size. This can be a challenge with limited funds.

We also foresee more demand for tech talent and less supply of talent in the market. This is because there is a huge gap between the skills fresh graduates have and what the job market needs.

We are working hard to grow our revenue, we are currently cash flow positive but our aim is to double our revenue monthly this year.

We are working on raising funds from friends and family, angel investors and VCs. This will sustain us for a longer timeline.

Educating clients has helped, we will work on more digital ways to educate them e.g through webinars etc so that we can teach a large number of people faster.

We partnered with IBM and Microsoft to train undergraduates on IT Skills that are relevant for the job market.

We are planning to expand to Europe, specifically France and Germany.

We did market research in Berlin in Q4 2019 and we are currently doing one in Paris this Q1 2020.

From our findings, we realised an interest in the African tech ecosystem and specifically an interest in African tech talent. These two regions are highly supportive of diversity and are already hiring from Africa, specifically from Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya and Ivory coast. Fortunately, these are areas where we have a good number of talent.

Our plan is to set up a sales team this year to get us clients in these two markets and outsource our talent to work for Companies remotely. We currently have a partnership with Africaworks in Germany, they are a traditional recruitment firm. We are their partner for tech hiring specifically for Africa talent.

Full-time - 6

Part-time - 2

The team is a Pan-African 50% female founded team made up of:

Elohor Thomas: she is native of Nigeria and the CEO of CodeLn. She has an MSc. degree in Systems Engineering (Artificial Intelligence Major) with vast experience in IT sales and recruitment. She has over 10 years experience working for top companies like Jumia, Africa's largest e-commerce platform.

Philisaiah Mwaluma: she is a native of Kenya and CTO of CodeLn. She has a degree in Software Engineering and she has gathered work experience working with Kenya's top Telco, Safaricom.

Dexter Ouattara: he is a native of Ivory Coast and the CPO of CodeLn. He has a degree in Software/Network Engineering and he has gathered work experience working with global firms like Epistrophe in Paris.

Dennis Nduta: he is a native of Kenya and COO of CodeLn. He has a degree in Cyber Security Engineering and he has gathered experience working in tech and entrepreneurship. 

We met at an accelerator program in Ghana and we stayed back to work on CodeLn full-time. Our experience in these various fields and our background in Engineering allows us empathise with both our users: recruiters and Programmers. Therefore, for us it is more than just a job, we are passionate about solving the broken tech hiring system in Africa.

We partner with:

Tech training schools: they supply our pipeline with talent while we focus of placing them on jobs

Recruitment agencies: we partner with traditional recruitment agencies as their tech partner helping the fill tech role for their clients.

We partner with IBM and Microsoft to train undergraduates on IT skills in order to groom them for the job market.

Programmers: our platform is free for Programmers, they signup and are being matched to jobs that match their skills.

Clients (Recruiters): We match them with skilled Software Engineers. They pay a 12% success fee of the Programmer's first year's salary.

We will combine Revenue, Grants and Investments. We raised $100,000 in 2018, this is what has been sustaining the business together with our revenue. 

We are currently raising another round as grant or equity and we are working hard on doubling our revenue month on month this year, 2020. 

As an HR Tech company, we believe the advice from ServiceNow experts will be very helpful for our internal processes.  The content, culture, powerful tools and best practices are what we hope to adopt in our organisation when we are selected. With the guidance of ServiceNow experts, we will be able to accelerate business outcomes, boost value, grow, boost performance and achieve success. We would integrate all our learning in order to create a better world of work in our organisation and for our clients as well.

Winning the Digital Workforce Challenge will allow us leverage on the resources and community from ServiceNow for our Software Developers' growth. We will push all our 9000 Programmers to get the Certifications specifically in the areas we have identified a match: IT, Cloud, SecOps, DevOPs and PAAS. We believe this will be a great learning platform for them to grow their skills.

Lastly, we are currently raising specifically for:

1. Company expansion across Africa (Anglophone and Francophone regions) and internationally (Germany and France)

2. Sales and Marketing targeted towards both Developers and Clients

3. Team Expansion (Sales and Engineering mostly)

We believe the cash prize will help with the areas above.

We have identified some partners and clients of ServiceNow that we would like to partner with:

Agineo, Cognizant, Direkt Gruppe, Ins.pi, Matrix42, Media solutions, Mobichord, Planhorizon, Plat4mation, Sopra Steria, Syscovery solve and Serve, Tsystems International, Wipro limited, Humans4help, Silverstorm Solution, Symantec, Accenture, Deloitte, DXC, IBM, and KPMG.

Partnering with these organisations, will allow us extend our services to their regions effectively by assisting them with their tech hiring need. And helping them source skilled tech talent from Africa.