The rise of remote working and the widespread adoption of technology has made it much easier for all sizes of employers to tap into global pools of talent. The urban population of the African continent is projected to reach 1.1 billion people by 2040, making it the largest global workforce. With an ever more diverse base of skills across 54 countries, it’s not surprising that outsourcing to Africa is on the rise.
So what can employers do to tap into this enormous talent pool? My guest this week is Valerie Bowden, founder and CEO of CRDLE. Valerie spent years travelling and working in Africa and now helps US and European businesses connect to talent in the world’s second-largest continent.
In the interview, we discuss:
• Tapping into global talent pools
• Why Africa?
• Language and timezones
• Types of skills
• Interns
• The social impact of outsourcing
• Are you already using African talent?
• Advice for effective outsourcing
• The importance of onboarding and training
• The future of remote teams
Listen to this podcast on Apple Podcasts.
Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:17]:
Hi there, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 501 of the Recruiting Future podcast. The rise of remote working and the widespread adoption of technology has made it much easier for all sizes of employer to tap into global pools of talent. The urban population of the African continent is projected to reach 1.1 billion people by 2040, making it the largest global workforce. With an ever more diverse base of skills across 54 countries, it’s not surprising that outsourcing to Africa is on the rise. So what can employers do to tap into this enormous talent pool? My guest this week is Valerie Bowden, founder and CEO of Cradle. Valerie spent years traveling and working in Africa and now helps US and European businesses connect to talent in the world’s second largest continent. Hi, Valerie, and welcome to the podcast.
Valerie Bowden [00:01:23]:
Hey, Matt, thanks for having me.
Matt Alder [00:01:25]:
An absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Please could you introduce yourself and tell us what you do?
Valerie Bowden [00:01:31]:
Yes, my name is Valerie. I’m the founder of Cradle and we connect African talent to businesses around the world.
Matt Alder [00:01:38]:
Fantastic stuff. Now tell us a little bit more about your backstory because it’s very relevant to the work that you do now. So how did you get to do the job that you do now?
Valerie Bowden [00:01:48]:
Great question. So I’m originally from the US but my whole life growing up, I wanted to visit Africa. It was always on my bucket list. And that was before I even realized how different the countries were and the different cultures. But I just knew I had a. I had to travel. So after grad school, I decided to do a backpacking trip. I took a one way flight to Cape Town, and then I spent seven months backpacking by myself. Just a tent, backpacking by public transport all the way across the entire length of the continent until I reached Cairo. And I went through 13 African countries. And it was an amazing experience. It really showed me the talent, the possibilities, the opportunities, and how unique each country is.
Matt Alder [00:02:35]:
Fantastic stuff. And then how did you get to kind of start the company that you. That you’re working for now?
Valerie Bowden [00:02:40]:
So after my trip, I relocated to Ethiopia for eight years. I had an amazing time. And while I was there, I got involved in the outsourcing scene because Ethiopia is quickly becoming one of the next outsourcing hubs. And I thought it was just so interesting to see These large Fortune 500 companies outsource work to Ethiopians. And not only the business proposition, but also the social impact behind It So when I moved back to the US a year ago, I launched my own company that helps businesses around the world outsource to African countries. And right now we’re primarily focused in Ethiopia, Rwanda and Uganda.
Matt Alder [00:03:19]:
So before we kind of get into the specifics around outsourcing work to Africa, tapping into African talent, how important do you think tapping into these global talent pools is going to be moving forward? Because it was something that was very much at the top of the agenda at the start of the pandemic when people realized how just how much work could be done remotely. But then, you know, are there some contradictory forces around that with people kind of bringing people back to offices and bringing industries back into the countries that they operate from? You know, what’s your view on the, the long term of all of this?
Valerie Bowden [00:03:57]:
Well, I believe that remote work is going to be around forever in some way, whether it’s 100% remote or a hybrid schedule. But really I think the relevance is that outsourcing in general is just so cost effective that if you can of course have some in house team members, but also outsource the work to someone who’s living in a more affordable country so you can pay the them less. Still a fair wage though, you know, why not? You can get more developers, more talent, more, more skills that will help you grow and scale your business in a better and safer way.
Matt Alder [00:04:32]:
And why Africa? I mean, I think that lots of people listening will be used to outsourcing jobs to all around the world, but they might not be familiar with working with African countries. So, so why, why is Africa?
Valerie Bowden [00:04:45]:
That’s a great question. I think everyone probably realizes that the Philippines and India are quickly becoming quite. You know, there’s been some rise in Eastern Europe and South America, but African countries also are kind of rising in the outsourcing model. And specifically for Europe, I mean most African countries are relatively on the same time zone. So that that works out quite well. And you know, on top of that, you know, there’s really cost effective labor. There’s not a lot of opportunities locally. So you have like a large talent pool to look from. And you know, English is spoken in pretty much every African country. So that also makes it easy to find, find people who have really great accents and who can be customer facing if you need them to be.
Matt Alder [00:05:33]:
And what type of talent are you typically working with? What types of skills are we talking about?
Valerie Bowden [00:05:39]:
So we work a lot with developers, full stack developers, front end, back end. We also do a lot of virtual assistants for smaller businesses and then One thing I’m really excited about is customer service, mostly because it’s, it’s like a pet peeve of mine when, when a company doesn’t have good contact center reps, but we do a lot of customer service reps and cold callers is also a really big thing. So the next time someone calls you, it could be an Ethiopian, so be nice. And lately one of the things we’ve been implementing is also interns in all of those positions you mentioned earlier, when.
Matt Alder [00:06:16]:
You were living in Ethiopia, you saw that, you saw the sort of social impact of, of outsourcing. Tell us a little bit more about that.
Valerie Bowden [00:06:22]:
Oh man, the social impact is really what drives me because my background is actually in social work, so I love that aspect of it. But you know, when you look at how do you reduce poverty, how do you create prosperity in an African community, it all comes down to really good sustainable jobs. And so when you look at outsourcing, you’re paying less compared to what you could find locally. But for an African community, it’s a really good wage and it’s one of the ways you can scale up quickly. So. So although we work with small clients, we also have big ones who want to start with 20 people, 100 people, 1,000 people. And it’s been really great to see that as outsourcing is rising in African cities, that the amount of students that are able to get jobs and make good money, pay back their loans, support their families is growing. So, yep, in terms of social impact, it’s, it’s one of the best things you can do is just to hire someone from, from an African community.
Matt Alder [00:07:26]:
Africa is a, is a very, very big continent which obviously has many, many countries. Are there sort of particular countries that you would recommend people working for? What are the kind of nuances between the different geographies in the continent?
Valerie Bowden [00:07:41]:
Yes, I’m glad you brought that up because what I found when I was backpacking and then living on the continent is every country is so, so different. Like it’s only for convenience sake that we say Africa because really the countries are so different. So I guess I always say like, if you want someone who’s calling cold caller or client facing Ethiopians have really good English accents. So especially when we work with American clients, we, we always pair them with Ethiopians. When it comes to Uganda and Rwanda, I feel like they have really good virtual assistants and developers that are a little bit more affordable. But many of them have also had international experience because there’s just, they’re like more developed countries so there’s been more foreign companies there. So they have great background. And then you know, if you have a French speaking audience then of course like Madagascar or Morocco also has really good French speakers. So yep, every country is, is quite different. And recently we started building a partnership with some, some partners in Zimbabwe and they have a lot of like accounting majors and opportunities so that if I had someone who wanted an accountant or support in that area, I would go to Zimbabwe to source that talent. So yep, every country is, is really different in that, in that way.
Matt Alder [00:08:58]:
Is it likely that companies are already using African talent but aren’t kind of aware of it? There’s sort of, lots of, lots of, lots of outsourcing happening in the sort of supply chain of talent. If it were, as it were, yes.
Valerie Bowden [00:09:10]:
White labeling is huge. And I actually remember being in the UK at a conference and the, the booth beside us was, was like a large company and I was telling them what they like what we did and they’re like, oh, we love the idea of working with Africans but we can never do that. We only hire locally in the uk. And in my head I was thinking like, oh, you actually are our client because they had outsourced some of their development work to a UK company who then outsourced it to developers in Ethiopia and they just had no idea. And I find this a lot that there’s lots of white labeling being done. And so what I always say, if you’re willing to outsource a piece of your business or back office processing to someone locally, you might as well look at Africa instead because chances are they might be outsourcing it as well. But when you do it directly and you go to the source, you can actually pay less and then the Africans actually get paid more because it’s direct.
Matt Alder [00:10:08]:
And what would your tips be for companies who are looking to outsource to Africa? How should they get started? What should they have in place to make sure it’s successful?
Valerie Bowden [00:10:18]:
That’s a great question. So what we do when we work with clients is we always speak to them, we find out what they want, we get the job descriptions, we present different candidates, usually from different countries, so they kind of get a feel of the differences. And then after we do like the initial interview, we always do like a one month pilot. So that way there’s like no long term pressure. You can really get the feel for the person if they’re going to work out. And then after that I always recommend that people just do month by month contracts. Like never lock yourself into a long term arrangement. Because one of the benefits of outsourcing is that you do have that flexibility. And then I think a lot of it comes down to just really good onboarding and really good training. And what I’ve found that as long as you are meeting daily or at least a weekly meeting and you’re giving them the same training that you give any in house team member, the African talent that we place always does just as well, if not better than the US or European talent, because in the end it’s the same. As long as they’re trained the same and given the same information, they’ll perform very much the same way.
Matt Alder [00:11:28]:
And as a final question, you know, I always ask people about the future and what that looks like in their particular, in their particular area. What do you think the future looks like for outsourcing to Africa? What do you hope we’d be talking about if we were having this conversation again in, in two or three years time?
Valerie Bowden [00:11:47]:
In two or three years, I believe that it’s going to be more well known that these hubs exist. So people will be saying like outsourcing to India, the Philippines or Addis Ababa, Ethiopia or Nairobi, like it’s going to become more commonplace and common knowledge already. I mean, we see big companies outsourcing and just nobody knows about it. So I think that’s going to become common. And I think the idea of just building remote teams in general will also become bigger. So, you know, now we still have companies who are a little bit hesitant about building a remote development team or remote customer service team. And I think in the future they’re going to see that it doesn’t matter where that team’s based and that there’s a lot of advantages to having a remote team somewhere.
Matt Alder [00:12:31]:
And lastly, where can people find and connect with you?
Valerie Bowden [00:12:35]:
Yes. So of course you can go to our website, cradle.com but I’m also on LinkedIn and every day I’m posting lots of tips and insights. And I guess one thing I would recommend for people is that if you’re thinking about African talent, but you’re not sure, we are rolling out this like massive internship program. So it’s a really good way to try out the talent at like a really affordable cost and see if it’s a good fit for you. So you can also just message us specifically looking for interns as well.
Matt Alder [00:13:08]:
Valerie, thank you very much for talking to me.
Valerie Bowden [00:13:11]:
Thank you.
Matt Alder [00:13:13]:
My thanks to Valerie. You can subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts on Spotify or via your podcasting app. Of choice. Please also follow the show on Instagram. You can find us by searching for Recruiting Future. You can search all the past episodes@recruitingfuture.com on that site. You can also subscribe to our monthly newsletter, Recruiting Future Feast, and get the inside track about everything that’s coming up on the show. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next time and I hope you’ll join me.
