OfferZen is on a mission to improve the experience of finding work for people involved in making software, from developers to designers and data scientists through the utilisation of our world-class online recruitment marketplace. We do this by flipping the traditional recruitment model on its head and getting companies to reach out to candidates with upfront offers.

Over the last 10 years, we have managed to make a large dent in the South African online tech recruitment marketplace - and we're speeding up. We have a team of 50+ people with offices in both Cape Town and Amsterdam. At 10 years young, we’re still in an exciting scale-up phase which allows us to develop new and exciting ideas, innovate our product, and think creatively about solving real problems.

We love to do fun stuff together: We are focused on building a connected tribe and a sense of belonging. We value unique and diverse approaches and ensure we create opportunities to share and learn from each other. We have regular online events, show and tells and a book club as well as regional and annual off-site events.

We're dedicated to authenticity: We treat people as people, caring personally and speaking openly. We foster low-ego behaviour - we own our mistakes as well as our victories. We're never about blame. We're always about honesty, learning and continuous improvement. We ensure lots of transparency and visibility. From OKRs and strategy to analytics and company performance numbers, it's all available for you to see and understand.

We're passionate about learning and levelling up: Everyone at OfferZen strives for a growth mindset. We read books, listen to podcasts, share expertise obsessively, then take on hard challenges with smart guidance and support. When things go wrong, we look for the learnings and how to improve.

We’re all about balance: We believe that maintaining a healthy balance between home and work is the key to feeling happier and more productive. We are remote first and offer 24 days of leave a year which are available to use from the time you start.

Living it: We consider how we’re serving our customers as the ultimate goal for all activities.

Our marketplace thrives when both companies and candidates get massive value. When designing our offering, we start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology and processes.

Each one of us knows our customers and their challenges intimately. When weighing alternatives, the most important factor we consider is which approach best serves our customers.

How we live this value:

Living it: We share our work so that others have the context they need to move fast.

By the standards of the rest of the world, we overtrust. We make context around strategic business decisions available to everyone in the team and default to sharing our work early and openly. Whenever possible, we also prefer providing context about what being responsible looks like rather than creating rules or policies to enforce behaviours.

We believe that having access to information creates autonomy; allowing people on all levels of the organisation to move fast and make better decisions. It also creates an opportunity for others to help us improve our work or to simply learn from each other.

How we live this value:

Living it: We share candid feedback with positive intent.

Beyond trying to be successful individually, we help the team around us to level up and succeed. One of the key ways we do that is through constructive feedback.

Giving and receiving feedback is never easy, but it works for us because we know there is personal growth in the discomfort. We also understand that speaking your mind requires equal parts brains (what to say), thoughtfulness (when to say it), and caring (how it’s said). While we expect those giving feedback to be mindful, we also expect the receiver to apply a simple heuristic: by default, assume best intentions from others.

How we live this value:

Living it: We expect and quickly adapt to change. We avoid becoming complacent and stay ahead of the competition in a global market.

As companies mature, they often get set in their ways and make it harder for teams to innovate. At OfferZen, we’re set on our mission but not sacred about the way we’ve done things in the past. Instead, we relentlessly strive to do things better.

This can be challenging because we don’t spend a lot of time just being comfortable with the way things are but it helps us build a world-class product. We continuously improve our processes, take bold bets to move the needle and spend a ridiculous amount of time levelling up.

How we live this value:

Living it: We prioritise our focus and effort against the impact it will have on the team and customers.

We aspire to create a world-class offering, but at the same time we also want to move fast. So how do we balance quality with speed? We pay attention to the details that really matter and cut corners where they don’t. We also understand the impact of what we’re working on and invest the appropriate amount of effort.

In many, if not most, cases, the fastest approach to create a world-class service is to actually release it to customers while it’s still got a few rough edges.

How we live this value:

Living it: We take ownership of our own decisions and get focused input from others on our projects so that we end up with the best outcome.

We prize qualified and informed ideas. In the pursuit of good ideas, we don’t mind being wrong or ruffling some feathers. We don’t hide or protect our ideas from others, in fact it’s quite the opposite: We farm for dissent in order to battle test our ideas.

Beyond farming for dissent, we trust in data over opinions. We consider data as the highest source of truth at OfferZen and it overrides everything else. On very rare occasions, we do act in opposition to what the data is telling us if we have a very clear reason to - but those situations are few and far between.

At OfferZen, we celebrate the moments where we find out we're wrong or where there's room to improve, because they are opportunities to learn and refine our ideas. It's amazing what you accomplish if you don’t care who gets the credit or who gets blamed.

How we live this value:

OfferZen is a tech talent marketplace founded by Developers for Developers. Our platform matches top software talent with exciting opportunities at companies in South Africa and Europe.

Our mission is to connect every developer with opportunities to build an awesome future.

We believe that great developers are everywhere. And with the right opportunities, they can build an awesome future. The more people building software, the faster we get there. The more diverse the builders, the more awesome it will be.

But there are some problems that get in the way of all this:

At OfferZen we're tackling all three of these problems by creating a platform that connects developers and companies from around the world. In the process, we are working to give every developer opportunities to build an awesome future.

Every aspect of our business needs to come together for someone to find a job through our platform. That's why our north star metric - our key measure of success - is the number of people we help find a job.

The impact of software on our society is hard to overstate and it's one of the key drivers for building the future. The amazing thing about software development as a career is that it's cheap to learn, rewards merit over qualifications, and has the power to be the primary global economic driver for a long time to come.

Malan and Philip are also both software developers so they have a personal affinity for this problem.

Find upcoming virtual tech events here online, and in South Africa.

We currently have offices in Cape Town with a satellite branch in Amsterdam, with future plans to grow even further in Europe and Africa - watch this space!

🇿🇦Cape Town - South Africa