When you need to make a critical hire, it’s necessary to manage the extensive hours spent in interviews while extending offers to developers, considering that each day’s delay will cost you down the line. With ambitious growth goals, the software development house BET Software needed to avoid a lengthy hiring time. Here’s how they were able to significantly speed up their hiring process, save on hiring costs and triple the size of their tech team with the help of OfferZen.
BET Software is a software development house that provides betting software across sub-Saharan Africa, and got its start as a small department within Hollywoodbets. Since then, they’ve developed into a standalone development house. With ambitious growth plans to expand their footprint across the continent, they needed to find a faster way to hire developers.
Pooja Singh, Head of Talent, and Nombulelo Ngcaku, Senior Talent Acquisition Specialist at BET Software addressed the four critical areas that helped them scale with OfferZen:
1. Managing high volumes of applicants with a smaller hiring team
2. Seeking highly skilled developers with a niche skillset
3. Growing their dev brand to be known as a great place to work in tech
4. Balancing growth with clear return on investment
Here’s how OfferZen helped them meet their goal of tripling the size of their tech team:
Speeding up the hiring process to get offers out
Once the team at BET Software set out to scale their team, they had to contend with high volumes of applications that they struggled to screen quickly enough with a small hiring team:
“OfferZen really helped us pick up the ball in that respect,” says Pooja. “We needed to get offers out quickly and limit our time. OfferZen helped us change our processes with quick screening of candidates.”
To save time sourcing developers on OfferZen, they found particular value in the automated profile matching, as well as the wide range of filters available in search:
“With the automated matching on OfferZen; I get exactly what I’m looking for,” says Nombulelo. “It’s very clean, efficient, easy and friendly for hiring teams to use. It eliminates the need to search for candidates through other channels, and has saved myself and the team a lot of time. I can search for everything from salary to remote preferences, and I only have to do it once for a role - if I go back tomorrow, I can call up the same search parameters without having to set it up again.”
Finding high quality developers with the right skillsets
As a growing dev house, finding niche candidates for their targeted growth areas is hard. Especially when you’re only engaging passive talent that are not necessarily ready to move jobs.
Nombulelo highlights several advantages of using a more active talent pool that is actively engaged and pre-screened before they can use OfferZen:
“The candidates also know they’re not dealing with any other platform, they’re ready to participate since they choose who they get to talk to. They’re proactive with a great turnaround time compared to other platforms.”
“The experience with candidates has been amazing, they have excellent etiquette when they respond to us. It’s quick and easy to set up interviews, all relevant information is shared from the get-go. They know the calibre of companies on OfferZen, and they act very professionally in turn.”
Some of Nombulelo’s other favourite features include:
- New candidates that become available every Monday.
- A shortlist of suggested candidates that are sent to her every week, which helps her be proactive in outreach.
- Upfront desired salaries on developers’ profiles, which helps them avoid wasted time if salaries are outside of their budgets.
“OfferZen really stands out as its own league, in terms of how the candidates conduct themselves. You’re putting the brightest minds out there and making it very easy for us to engage with developers.“
Saving on hiring costs
To make their hires, BET Software used an Unlimited hiring plan where they could hire as many developers as they needed at a fixed cost.
With this plan, the team at BET Software saved over R2.3m (60-65%) on hiring costs compared to recruitment agencies, which made it a no-brainer to renew their unlimited hiring subscription:
“We have high hopes of further partnering with OfferZen, we want to double our growth from the previous year. Anyone recruiting in the tech industry understands the need for good quality developers,” says Pooja.
On an OfferZen subscription, you can make unlimited developer hires and avoid paying individual, varying hiring fees for every hire.
Growing brand presence
Besides making successful hires, the dedicated company profile helped grow their brand presence in South Africa:
“We’ve now become more of a household name due to partnerships such as OfferZen. We chat to many candidates every week on the platform, we have between 40 and 80 engagements a week. We’ve never had that level of exposure before. Even if we aren’t converting them into successful hires, we are growing our brand. We stay top of mind if they do come onto the job market again,” says Pooja. “We’re able to showcase our company values in the best way possible.”
The results
To date, BET Software has hired 52 developers through OfferZen, with 30 hires made in 2023 alone.
“OfferZen brings together two of the key factors we like to find in tech talent and the hires we make,” concludes Pooja. “One is the skill and proactiveness of the talent, and the second thing is the culture of the individuals. It’s is a very people-centric platform. Although many features we use are automated, you also have a very human-centred support service. The entire team at OfferZen comes to the party to help us succeed.”
The developers they’ve hired also speak to finding a great fit at BET Software — from the initial interview experience, to joining the team:
“I really enjoyed interviewing at BET Software. It was not a series of questions and answers, it was a real conversation that enabled me to showcase my abilities and most importantly; gauge what the company actually is,” says Mpucuko Ndlazi, Software Development Engineer at BET Software.
“One of the things that excite me about working for BET Software is its culture, which has a sense of purpose and enthusiasm in all its aspects. The genuine desire to make positive changes in people’s lives is most striking to me.”
Are you hiring software developers? OfferZen is a curated developer hiring marketplace that connects job-seeking developers with exciting opportunities at over 2000 companies in South Africa and beyond.
Hiring teams can make unlimited hires across all the roles on OfferZen, saving up to 50% compared to traditional recruitment costs.
