OfferZen Podcast

Meeting the deadlines and expectations of software projects depend on properly scoping features, algorithms and dependencies before touching any code. This is the step-by-step process Sizwe Ndlovu, Head of DevOps at Pineapple, and his team follow - with a project planner template you can download too!

Read the blog post here.

Sivuyisiwe Tshula has found that Agile Methodology is the key to empowering people in teams to voice their ideas and give equal input on a project’s direction. When there is no structure in place to guide workflows, this sense of empowerment can easily be lost. Here is how Agile has helped Sivu grow as part of a tech team.

Read the blog post here: http://bit.ly/2Kh75JR

By Frikan Erwee

Feeling a sense of job satisfaction is incredibly important, especially for developers: If you’re happy, you’re more motivated at work, and at a lower risk of burning out. Even though a salary might contribute to your happiness, it doesn’t always help you push through grindwork, or through solving hard problems. In this article, I’ll take you through some questions that helped me evaluate my job satisfaction, and some tips I used to answer them.

Read the blog post here: http://bit.ly/316JQJ5

By Alley Marsh

Figuring out how to approach a conversation about a salary increase with employers can be scary, especially when you know you’ve been underpaid, because it’s hard to know where to find reliable data and how to present your case with confidence. As a Talent Advisor at OfferZen, I have seen a lot of people struggle with this, and would like to share some tips and tricks to help make this something you can handle with confidence.

Read the blog post here: http://bit.ly/336TME8

Having a team of motivated individuals with high morale will not only make working at your company more enjoyable, but also keeps everyone more resilient to burnout and stress. Jaco Prinsloo, Vice President of Custom Development at EPI-USE Labs, shares how he fosters and elevates team morale and individual purpose on a daily basis.

Read the blog post here: http://bit.ly/2MyBaay

By Ewald Horn

No matter how many interviews you’ve been to, you probably still get nervous, and you probably still feel under-prepared. They never seem to get easier, but we also only tend to do them once in a while, which makes it hard to practice being good at them. As someone that’s been on both sides of the table, I’ve developed some useful tips over the years to help you prepare better for interviews, by focusing on what you do control, making them less stressful.

Working in the tech industry makes it easy to default to digital solutions for the systems and processes that are used on a day-to-day basis. However, these digital solutions are not always the best options to use when you are looking to promote engagement within your team. Operations Manager, Alyssa Lohmaier at WeAreMonsters shares how swapping out certain digital processes for analogue ones got her team to work better together.

Most hiring decisions are typically based off of a ‘gut feeling’. This makes it hard to attribute what ‘worked’ and what ‘didn’t work’ in the hiring process, which affects how confidently you hire someone. Travelstart, however, makes a predominantly data-based decision in their interviews, without removing the ‘human’ touch. 

Lee Watts, Human Resource Business Partner, says that their quantitative approach, in fact, not only makes interviews much shorter, but also gives them a far more qualitative idea of whether someone is a right fit or not. 

We talked to Lee about how Travelstart gets it right, what they’ve learned about the short-falls around traditional interviews, and what impacts it has on the hires they make. 

Listen to our conversation here, and find the full transcript to our chat below.

Link to transcript: http://bit.ly/30GwSRY

Having a good company culture can be your most powerful tool in succeeding as a business, or as an individual in the tech space. It is important to remember how each person can contribute, because we invest too much time into our careers to spend it in an environment that doesn’t allow us to do what we are passionate about.

When it comes to hiring, there is no “one size fits all” approach, and trying to use the same approach across different contexts will risk turning a great candidate into a bad hire. Benny Ou has hired for different contexts, and has developed a set of useful questions to ask himself before he hires, in order to mould his hiring process to the specific context he’s in.