From good to great: Proxify's role in the impressive ROI of Ada Growth

In today's fast-paced and highly competitive business landscape, hiring top tech experts is one of the most significant challenges companies face. It's even more challenging for startups and small businesses that are just starting and need more resources to invest in recruiting and hiring. One such example was Ada Growth, an EdTech company that needed a streamlined process, allowing them to identify and hire developers that fit their needs quickly.

About Ada Growth

Ada Growth is an EdTch company that aims to empower women by giving them access to a mentor in their pocket via their Ada App. Ada Growth uses a combination of microlearning and artificial intelligence to provide companies with a female-centric professional development tool.

Using this approach, Ada Growth delivers bite-sized chunks of information that can be easily consumed and applied in real-world situations, making it easy for women to learn and grow at their own pace. The platform's core focus is on providing women with the tools and resources to make their strengths visible. Ultimately, they are helping women worldwide build their confidence and achieve their goals.

The challenge

Ada Growth believes in the power of mentoring to transform lives and open up opportunities. However, the company realized that mentoring could be more robust in its scalability, which is the reason behind its mission.

Matthew Ziebarth, Co-founder and CTO of Ada Growth, says they saw a significant gap between female developers and mentors. Based on this, the company decided to bridge the gap by making its resources readily available in technology.

"We wanted to provide this in a female-centric, non-generic form. There are a lot of EdTech solutions out there in terms of the corporate space, and few of them focus on the challenges that we're hearing in the market that women face at work, specifically that women are telling us about.”

To overcome this, Ada Growth needed to hire skilled developers who could create an innovative solution that would allow them to reach more women and scale their impact. However, they faced a significant challenge in finding suitable candidates, emphasizes Ziebarth.

"Employing full-time technical talent in Austria is hard, even if you're an established, huge enterprise. But for a brand-new startup, it's incredibly difficult and even impossible.”

In the beginning, they worked with a service provider but found that it wasn’t up to their standards. Yet, they were happy to go through this trial and error phase early in their journey because it provided a valuable lesson. This led them to look into hiring locally for full-time members, which proved to be another hurdle.

"We realized the overall landscape for hiring was incredibly difficult and how challenging that would have been as an alternative.”

With limited time and resources, their CTO struggled to scan through dozens of different skill sets and languages to find the right fit for their team. The sweet spot for them would have been to find a service provider they could trust and validate and who had already vetted their developers.

The solution

To continue growing and innovating, Ada needed to hire top-notch developers who could help bring their vision to life. That's where Proxify came in. By leveraging Proxify's expert staffing solutions, Ada could quickly and efficiently hire the developers needed to take their company to the next level.

Ziebarth says,

“One of the reasons we went with Proxify as a service provider is that we needed to bring in talent that we could trust and who would quickly contribute to our mission.”

Kosima Kovar, co-founder and CEO of Ada Growth, said that flexibility was vital for the company.

"We had a specific need and were looking for a specific person, which we found pretty fast with Proxify’s help.”

Proxify’s vast network of pre-vetted developers allowed Ada Growth to find the right talent for their specific needs without time-consuming and costly recruiting efforts.

Kovar adds,

"It feels like there was less risk [with Proxify] because we could find the talent we needed way quicker. It's also quicker to change in a different direction [based on your company’s needs.” And I think especially for startups and young businesses, which is extremely valuable.”

The results

By using Proxify, Ada Growth was able to save valuable time and resources that would have otherwise been spent on recruitment efforts. Through Proxify, Ada Growth was matched with three developers with the skills and experience to help their businesses thrive.

By contrast, according to Ziebarth, previously, it would take them six to nine months to hire full-time staff. However, in their experience with Proxify, he was able to get started on an engagement with a developer within one month of hiring them.

“The developers we're working with are intermediate and senior developers with good communication skills. I don't know if this is intended to be part of the screening process, but certainly, it stands out.”

Ziebarth also said it is not uncommon to find issues in production late at night. However, the new team of developers they hired was able to troubleshoot the issues with their varied expertise and database logging quickly.

The swiftness of the team working together and combining their incredible skills to find solutions to the problem has resulted in a successful business relationship.

The way forward

For Kovar, the future looks bright!

“With Proxify, we can build a culture at Ada and still have the best talent on hand. And this is always valuable.”

She adds that it’s not entirely about knowing what you need for a successful hire through Proxify. It’s also about trusting the process and not taking shortcuts.

“If you're not sure who you need, trying out this process is always better than hiring somebody who might be less experienced and is cheaper.”