Before 2011
The Dzemo story begins with our founder. After working as a
software engineer and employee from 2005 to 2011, he shifted to
working as a freelance engineer for companies of all sizes from
large corporations to startups. For some startups, he would hire
a whole team and build software for them. Recruiting at this
stage took up about 10% of his monthly working hours.
After 2014
In 2014, he worked full-time as a freelance consultant engineer
at one of the Rocket Internet companies, where he was partly
responsible for scaling a team of engineers from 30 to 70 within
a span of 16 months.
He began to see, first-hand, how difficult it was for HR to find
the right engineers at the sourcing stage of the recruitment and
present them to the team leads of the various projects for hire.
The HR department was mostly made of Psychology and Business
graduates, who don’t usually have a good grasp of the
technologies for which they are recruiting.
That is when he, as an engineer, decided to get more involved in
the sourcing process of recruitment, because an engineer can
more easily understand the technologies and hard skills being
sought after and spot the talent needed for the team faster.
He conceived the idea of Dzemo, which means “I am me”.
2019
He later met our Engineering Director, in November of 2019 at
Factory Berlin, a community space for innovators. He shared the
concept of ‘engineers hiring engineers’ with him.
Our Engineering Director, who extremely values time and is an
expert on reducing effort and optimizing the time of any work
process, had the idea to speed up, especially the sourcing stage
with the use of advanced Automation and Machine Learning
techniques.
Both directors started managing Dzemo, but around this time were
also operating it, in a double function, as a Media Agency that
develops software for other companies.
2020
In December 2020 our Engineering Director insisted on focusing
only on one type of company and service. After a long and
thoughtful analysis, the focus narrowed to Recruiting, resulting
in the Media Agency part being dropped.
This vision has continued to grow and we have served numerous
clients, mostly software and technology-centered companies.
Our aim is to further streamline our unique recruiting approach
until it becomes an industry standard.
2022
In 2021, discussions around changing our pricing models began.
And as a result, we ended up with what we now call
‘Subscription-based recruiting’, where the client pays a monthly
subscription fee for us to recruit an engineer for them and a
percentage of the candidate’s annual salary after a successful
hire.
Better still, all these changes led us to explore Africa,
starting with Nairobi. Yes, we are now in Africa, and we are
growing fast.