Andela's Evolution Continues: Welcome Qualified.io & Codewars

Today was a big one.

Andela was founded nearly a decade ago on the premise that brilliance is evenly distributed but opportunity is not 's — and we've proven this true with the placement of thousands engineers at almost 100 Enterprise clients. While in many ways the world's journey to revolutionize hiring is just beginning, Andela's acquisition of Qualified.io has considerably accelerated the road ahead. Let me share why.

It is no longer unusual to hire talent globally. As we shared last March, our platform has evolved to make Andela the obvious global marketplace for technologists to find meaningful work and for clients to find expert talent. It is, however, difficult for clients to know with certainty that they are hiring the right technical talent with the right skills for the role. One of the key insights we've uncovered over the last decade is that if someone in the talent space says they have 1-3% of the top talent, they are misleading you. Even if they could prove this perfectly, it is not ultimately what matters. What matters, rather, is the probability that a given person will be the right fit for a given role. To do that, you need to be able to understand in the most granular way possible what is true about a person and what is true about the role and company with whom they would be working. Arguably, this is the biggest challenge hiring managers face: how can they know a new hire will succeed? 

Qualified, as the top technical assessment platform, accelerates Andela's ability to solve this problem and thereby raises the probability of success for a new hire by certifying their skills before the engagement begins. Qualified is a leader in this space: enterprise companies like Meta, Zoom and Dominos already trust Qualified to assess their internal talent. When I met Jake and the Qualified team, it was immediately apparent that by bringing them into Andela we could accelerate our ability to understand what was true about an engineer in a more data-driven and thoughtful way than we've ever been able to. And, that if we combined their skills with ours we'd be better able than anyone else in the world to connect brilliance with opportunity.  We will, of course, continue to offer the assessments as a standalone product, as well as integrating the certification into Andela's platform as a standard for our talent.

Like many other technology companies, Andela is keenly aware of the role AI will play going forward, and we believe that the capabilities of Qualified move us towards a more predictive matching process on our platform. It makes me incredibly excited to consider the efficiency unlock for our clients as they come to understand that Andela now not only provides access to global talent but raises and standardizes the bar at which those engineers are certified.

As part of Qualified, Andela welcomes the Codewars platform: a community of 3.6 million engineers who complete challenges, test their skills, and enhance their coding practice on a peer to peer platform. Codewars will continue to exist as Codewars - we see no reason to change one of the most important tools in the engineering ecosystem and we are proud to continue to support it. We believe this community of engineers will be well served by accessing the opportunities on the Andela platform and our clients will similarly benefit from a global supply of keen, proactive and certified engineers.    

Congratulations to Jake, Nathan and the entire Qualified team! We are excited to welcome you to Andela and to be on this journey together as Andela continues to lead the way in creating a global frictionless supply chain for human capital. Top engineers deserve opportunities for great work regardless of location and hiring managers deserve to know that the talent they hire will succeed on the job. Today's acquisition takes us one step closer to making those needs a reality.