Mastercard Foundry, the hub for new product development at Mastercard, needed to rapidly expand its engineering teams to scale up promising global products.
But Mastercard faced a huge problem that practically all companies face today: it couldn’t hire the right engineers fast enough. It was taking 8 to 12 weeks to find and hire candidates and project needs kept changing at the same time.
So Mastercard tapped a new hiring model as part of its strategy to grow and maintain a competitive and high-quality tech team: Adaptive Hiring.
Adaptive hiring marks a shift from fixed to variable cost hiring models and differs from traditional hiring, outsourcing, and freelance marketplaces. How? Adaptive hiring focuses on flexible, skills-based hiring that is borderless and grounded on specific project requirements. This means companies get the right talent at the right time for the right amount of time.
By leaning into adaptive hiring, Andela engineers were quickly sourced and placed with Mastercard Foundry within 2–4 weeks. The embedded engineers successfully built and scaled agriculture, education, and small business solutions with partners. Mastercard Foundry was able to mature products while maintaining a flexible structure. Adaptive hiring and a continued partnership with Andela allow Mastercard Foundry the flexibility to ramp talent up or down seamlessly. Andela engineers have continued to partner with Mastercard engineering colleagues on various global initiatives, including loyalty, point-of-sale solutions, and more.
As business scaling needs shift up and down in a particular moment in time, adaptive hiring leverages untapped markets to tap into the right skills when needed.
That’s why leading companies such as Mastercard Foundry, GitHub, Goldman Sachs, ViacomCBS, Seismic, and many more partner with 10-year-old Andela for their adaptive hiring model. The companies get quick access to Andela’s vetted and qualified global marketplace of digital talent, numbering 150,000 and providing a diverse range of skills and perspectives that are flexible and continually improving.
“When taking on any project, there are always three constraints, commonly known as the Iron Triangle – time, cost, scope. And the saying goes that you can pick two. With Andela’s adaptive hiring model, we get all three,” says Ed Donner, Co-Founder and CTO of AI-powered recruitment platform Nebula.io. “We were able to reach our development initiatives 6-to-9 months faster, largely due to our partnership with Andela. They met every sprint milestone — there’s a spotless execution track record. I joke that Andela helped us break the Iron Triangle.”
Old Models No Longer Work
Global economic and geopolitical uncertainty over the last few years has created challenges for IT leaders. As leaders navigate these waters, they are also faced with determining how to leverage disruptive new technologies, such as Generative AI and large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, and meet the demands for speed, flexibility, reliability, security, and value with the acceleration for digital.
The old models once used to overcome these hurdles are no longer efficient or cost-effective. Time, cost, scope —the iron triangle – fluctuate more rapidly, while the landscape for talent acquisition has dramatically changed post-pandemic.
And the challenges are only going to get worse.
As of the start of 2024, the unemployment rate for US tech workers was just 2.3%, even tighter than the historically low overall unemployment rate of 3.7%, according to a recent analysis of U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data. This means that almost every company seeking tech talent faces the same problem: it’s difficult to hire and super costly if you don’t hire effectively. Without the right talent at the right time, key projects can lose momentum, get put on hold or end up canceled. Large-scale organizational transformations fail about 70% of the time, according to McKinsey research.
With a razor-thin number of tech workers available, plus growing demand for certain skills like GenAI and data science, it will be increasingly difficult for companies to innovate if they only hire locally.
Adaptive hiring offers a new approach to traditional software development constraints.
Andela operates a global, private marketplace so enterprises can access digital talent in more than 136 countries. It sources, screens, and onboards the engineers, handling nearly the entire process from start to finish. Using AI/ML in its platform, Andela Talent Cloud, it matches the right talent’s skills for the right roles — at the right speed and cost. The company has a 96%+ talent match success rate and a speed to hire up to 70% faster than traditional recruiting. Over the last 10 years, Andela has trained a learning community of almost 110,000 African digital talent – that represents 15% of the total engineering population in Africa -– the fastest growing continent for tech talent in the world.
Expanding influence in a global market
Rather than compete for the same limited, local network of engineers, organizations that take a borderless approach can hire from a global pool of talent and gain competitive advantage with more choice, value, scale, quality, and flexibility in terms of who they hire.
“Our global client footprint requires us to deliver to anywhere from anywhere. To accomplish this, we need a balanced, global talent strategy,” said Ikechi Okoronkwo, Executive Vice President, Analytics & Data Science at Choreograph. “With Andela, we scale up or down easily as business needs change. They help us quickly find talent that is highly motivated, highly skilled and that embodies a culture of excellence and delivery. Talent hits the ground running which drives maximum value for our clients. Andela de-risks global hiring, so businesses can grow and be competitive.”
The 2022 Gartner Borderless IT Workforce Survey found that 58% of enterprises surveyed had some technology talent working in a fully remote borderless arrangement. Yet that represented only 11% of the technology talent among those enterprises.
Some companies are moving far faster into borderless, adaptive hiring mode.
Kinship has worked with Andela for almost three years, spanning 14 different countries with a concentration in Africa and Latin America. “Andela talent makes up a significant portion of our engineering team depending on what projects we are working on,” said Eddie King, head of B2B Engineering at Kinship. “Andela has been a strategic partner, helping us rapidly hire for short-term projects, as well as grow and maintain relationships with the engineers who continue to work on long-term projects.
Adaptive Hiring accelerates digital transformation initiatives
A global presence offers companies opportunities for growth, innovation, and resilience in an increasingly interconnected and competitive world economy. Going forward, adaptive hiring will play a big role in giving companies a much better chance of pulling off whatever digital transformations they seek to make.
With Andela, it’s much easier to establish dedicated teams for digital transformation projects that don’t always require full-time employees. Andela can stand up tech talent in a matter of days, not weeks, and every team is onboarded with skills specific to the job they’re hired for, so they can drive greater progress in a short period of time. Given the need for ever more GenAI skills across companies in all industries, adaptive hiring will play an even larger role in enabling companies to pursue digital initiatives.
“With data at the forefront, I think we’re seeing a lot of demand for skills related to data engineering. We obviously have a lot of demand from our clients looking for solutions built on top of data. Being able to scale the team to meet that demand and to do so with the best and the brightest from around the world is something that we continually try to do,” said Todd Mansfield, Managing Director at Goldman Sachs
As customers like Goldman Sachs continue to sustainably scale, they can utilize Andela’s adaptive hiring marketplace to tap into its remote-fluent talent anywhere in the world.
Learn how Andela’s borderless marketplace is reshaping the future of tech talent.
