Bad hiring decisions are a challenge that impacts all organisations, from small and medium enterprises (SMEs) to large enterprises, and often takes a significant financial toll on these organisations. In the local technology industry, where skills and talent are in short supply, the impact is felt even deeper, creating friction in delivery teams and delays in service and product delivery.
For managers, it’s a drain on time and energy; for development teams, it drains productivity and motivation, and for the business it’s a drain on finances. There has long been a perception that this is also the only route to finding and embedding talent – hire an unknown, trial them within the business, and recalibrate after three months. However, there has been a model step-change in recent years that’s reimagining the integration of junior staff in the business, one that puts them straight into the business long before the contract ink is wet.
When a candidate is trained inside the live environment, familiarising themselves with your stack, your delivery cycles, and your team at the very beginning of their training, they are bypassing the traditional onboarding curve. The return on their investment isn’t measured from the day they start their full-time role, but on their time to productivity as they grow within your teams and systems. It’s a different view that exposes the gap between the two approaches – instead of hiring someone and expecting them to somehow leapfrog from new to immersed in days, a business can partner with a training organisation that manages delivery and progress from trainee to full-time employee over a period of months.
Take Charity Banda, a redAcademy graduate whose entry as a junior software engineer into a leading technology company exceeded all expectations. Her manager had glowing feedback: Charity quickly took ownership of her module and even successfully resolved issues that more experienced developers were unable to – all within a period of three months. It wasn’t a year later or six months later, when most managers are still battling to integrate a junior within their team; it was just three months.
This immediacy is the difference between a cost and a return. A traditionally hired junior at three months is still being onboarded, but Banda is already part of the team. The feedback she has received has circled around her productivity, quality of delivery, initiative, ownership and problem-solving ability, all of which are well beyond what most companies expect from a junior developer.
Another challenge faced by many tech leaders is that the juniors they hire tend to leave once they’ve developed their skills. With redAcademy graduates, the evidence says otherwise, with many staying within the business, forming a pipeline of talent that grows from junior through to senior developer. One graduate, Phophi Muravha, chose not to go to university, instead prioritising her career progression, and has since been promoted to the position of intermediate software developer within the same company where she started her training.
None of this happens by accident; it’s the Skills Integration as a Service (SIaaS) model with redAcademy that invests in role-ready training customised to real business needs and real service delivery. Sprinters are overseen by redAcademy over a 12-month period broken down into six months of theory and six months of live client work – they are embedded within the workplace from very early on. They grow to know their teams before they’re hired, so a cultural fit is a proven point rather than a gamble, and the administration of bad hires disappears because there are no bad hires.
The timing today has never been more important, because universities can’t keep up with business needs in the area of critical technology skills. AI has widened the gap past the point of catching up. The answer is not, however, to hire fewer juniors or only hire talent with years of expertise, but instead to work with new ways of training and developing young people. Change the way that you hire and onboard your talent, and your entry-level talent becomes the most reliable return in your team.
