How Tunga Saves 50% On HR Costs for 250+ Clients: Q/A with CEO Ernesto Spruyt

Scaleups, startups, and SMEs hire tech talents abroad to save money, but end up burning cash more often than not.

Sounds familiar?

Then you must read this chat between Website Planet and Ernesto Spruyt, CEO at Tunga, a tech staffing company with a talent pool of 3000+ vetted African software engineers and 250+ clients across Europe and the USA.

You will learn how a trusted tech hiring agency with a proven talent base and hiring systems can save you up to 50% on hiring, staffing, and most operational costs without losing out on quality.

What problems do you solve for your customers?

Our clients need to work with great tech talents who can bring their ideas to life, solve business problems by leveraging technology, ensure their tech business continuity, and solve their client problems.

In the process of finding tech talents, they often encounter these problems:

• Inefficient recruitment processes
• Expensive local talent
• Local talent shortage
• Lack of internal hiring capacity

Here’s what usually happens…

Scale-ups, startups, and SMEs are known for their agile and lean operations, so they naturally try first to set up internal scouting processes that fail more often than not. That’s mostly because they do not have the infrastructure and risk coverage to hire globally, so they can only recruit and hire local, expensive talents.

So they try working with recruitment agencies but do not receive as much support, risk sharing, and personal touch as they hoped.

Eventually, they come to us knowing that we have fine-tuned our hiring processes over 8 years and have the best tools and techniques to identify the best talents. This will allow them to share the risks through our continuous support system and collaboration with the hired talent.

In fact, we handle payrolling, talent, and client support so that our clients can focus on serving their customers, while we take care of their human resource management by leveraging our proven talent base, systems, and structures.

So we save our clients a lot of time and headaches, but also a lot of money…

Local tech talent in Europe and the USA can be expensive for startups and SMEs compared to hiring remotely from Africa. Hiring our tech talents allows our clients to save as much as 50% on hiring, staffing, taxes, insurance, overhead, and other operational costs without losing quality.

That is because African talents are nowadays as good as local talent since the landscape has become so globalized that an average African developer has already worked with not just local organizations to build their skills but also clients across the globe in countries ranging from the US to the UK and Europe.

Which types of companies benefit the most from your services?

Scaleups, startups, and SMEs with staff sizes between 5 to 500 that leverage technology in their products and product delivery from any industry have found that working with our developers helps them to achieve their business goals.

Some of them have had issues with having to go through thousands of applications to find great talent or pay for testing software to evaluate the skills and competencies of potential candidates, thereby accruing a considerable amount of cost. Hiring internally has proven to be not cost-effective for them.

Some of our clients in the Netherlands and other parts of Europe have testified to the quality of work output that our developers from Africa provide. The remote talent from Africa might have a disadvantage in terms of being familiar with the local culture, but this is greatly compensated by the fact that they are generally much more eager to work, learn and develop themselves than local talent (And obviously, the costs for the remote developers are substantially lower).

What makes them eventually choose you over your competitors?

We are people-people, we believe that the art of matching requires a human touch. We have a hospitality mindset, therefore, we are not transactional but relational. In addition, we help our clients discover talent in the most unexpected places (we are expanding our pool beyond major African cities like Lagos, Abuja, Nairobi, and Cape Town) and going into the hinterlands to provide opportunities to talents, as long as remote work is possible.

One of the best parts of our work is that we currently provide jobs exclusively to Africans who live in Africa, our market focus helps us to niche down and fine-tune our expertise in hiring remote talent from Africa.

We also nurture a relational environment with our developers and clients:

• For our developers, we have a growing community for whom we provide various personal and professional development opportunities, including training, mentorship, and remote work support.
• For our clients, we take a personal and careful approach to matching them with the right talent and providing long-term support that keeps them doing business with us and with Africans.

Additionally, our matching processes include ensuring a personality fit and a culture fit between our developers and our clients instead of a mere skills match. This is one aspect most of our competitors do not focus on – Once we have the right match, our developers and clients often spend years working together.

How do you handle customer support?

Our customer support system is one of the most interesting parts of our work that most of our competitors do not offer. It is unique and very beneficial to our clients and is a practical example of how much we truly care about our clients and their businesses.

We provide support right from the first conversation and stay committed to facilitating a successful collaboration for as long as the developer is working for the client. We have dedicated talent managers who conduct the sourcing, testing, interviews, and shortlisting parts of the hiring process.

After the collaboration is in place, our clients also get a dedicated account manager and a dedicated delivery manager to provide them with support on issues, payments, developer growth, developer local challenges, and maintain communication lines with the organization.

This ensures that we have an ongoing relationship with the client and as we’ve found out, it gives them a sense of reassurance and helps them to trust us because we are there every step of the way.

How are you doing today and what’s in the roadmap for the future?

Up until now, we have worked exclusively with clients who require talent in the software development niche. Now, we are exploring new opportunities in the non-software engineering space as we have mastered the African talent market and have access to talent across other tech competencies. We are setting up structures to place talents in data analysis, digital marketing, and other similar areas, with clients who need them.

As the need to hire remote talent arises, with Africa being one of the countries with the largest youth population, we see it as an opportunity to place ourselves at the forefront of the African tech talent outstaffing market. It also helps that we are one of the staffing companies to enter into this market early.

We have worked with clients in Europe and the USA, we are also looking to work with clients in the UK, the United Arab Emirates, and multinational companies who have operations in Africa.

In addition, our goal is to always populate the pool of qualified African talent not just to draw from it, this resulted in the Tunga Academy. This is the platform through which we upskill and reskill junior tech talents by training them through a practice-based approach on international best practices and placing them with both local and international organizations on internships to boost their work experience.

Are you offering any partnership opportunities at the moment?

We are open to partnerships with Africa-based startups who want to hire developers for minimized costs to help them build their products or provide technical support to their teams and at the early stages of their startups.

We are also open to partnering with tech influencers and media houses who would like to tell our story on their various platforms.