E-Business
Andela Launches Integrated, End-to-End Platform to Bolster Global Remote Tech Hiring

Andela, the world’s largest private marketplace for technical talent, announced today the Andela Talent Cloud, an integrated, end-to-end platform to match global technologists with companies seeking to bolster capacity and skill sets.
The Andela platform is an all-in-one, AI-driven solution that provides IT executives with complete transparency of talent profiles and skills assessment results, enabling informed and secure hiring decisions.
“Market-leading organizations realize that rewriting their workforce strategies to include global, remote tech talent offers a distinct competitive advantage,” said Jeremy Johnson, Andela CEO and Co-Founder. “Andela offers a seamless approach. By combining the world’s preeminent private talent marketplace with an AI-driven platform, Andela helps companies scale their teams and deliver projects faster.”
The Andela Talent Cloud delivers clients greater speed, flexibility, performance, and trust, unlike other approaches to hiring, such as in-house recruiting, consulting firms, and outsourcing.
The solution allows IT organizations to scale quickly with a highly elastic resource pool and flexible hiring options, to find the right talent for the right role, at the right speed and cost.
The platform streamlines the complete hiring lifecycle, helping companies source, qualify, hire, manage, and pay global technologists in one integrated platform. The entire hiring process can take as little as 48 hours and be 30% to 50% more cost-efficient.
“Our global client footprint requires us to deliver to anywhere from anywhere. To accomplish this, we need a balanced global talent strategy,” said Ikechi Okoronkwo, Global Executive Director, Advanced Analytics at Mindshare.
“With Andela, we scale up or down easily as business needs change. They help us quickly find talent that is highly motivated, highly skilled, and embodies a culture of excellence and delivery. The talent hits the ground running, which drives maximum value for our clients. Andela de-risks global hiring, so businesses can grow and be competitive.”
According to a Gartner® Press Release, “[It] is no surprise that the rate of hiring borderless technology staff doubled in the last three years as increasing retention and hiring has risen to the No. 3 priority for CEOs this year and 2023, said Gabriela Vogel, Senior Director Analyst at Gartner.
The COVID-19 pandemic also accelerated borderless hiring, and what began as an exception is no longer.” “Gartner defines borderless workforce as talent working remotely from different countries based on an employment contract made across national borders.”
The Andela Talent Cloud features:
Enhanced AI Capabilities
At the core of the Andela Talent Cloud is the Talent Decision Engine™ (TDE) which is powered by AI and data-driven matching algorithms to pair the ideal talent to client-specific roles and skills requirements.
The TDE™ learns from thousands of data points across the hiring lifecycle, assessing a broad data set including both hard and soft skills, experience, title, geography, work preferences, language proficiency, candidate interactions, and client feedback for each and every job position.
The TDE™ reduces bias and subjectivity from the recommendation and matching process for each candidate presented for review and acceptance to ensure a fairer and more accurate match to the job requirements.
Further, the TDE™ continually evolves for each client by analyzing their interactions across the marketplace as well as talent success, enabling the platform to get smarter over time, and improving the ability to match the right talent for future project work.
Andela boasts a 96% talent match success rate and a speed to hire up to 70% faster than traditional recruiting, which is expected to improve as the platform scales from additional interactions and placements.
Predictive performance:
With the acquisition of Qualified in March 2023, Andela has integrated into the Talent Decision Engine™ proprietary developer assessment capabilities that help better determine the on-the-job performance of the recommended talent before selection.
The top customer-rated assessment platform on G2, Qualified, provides over 500 predefined and fully configurable coding challenges to evaluate technical skills objectively at scale.
Qualified uses an evidence-based evaluation process to signal skills-based proof that the engineering candidate can problem solve, make technically knowledgeable decisions, and has the requisite hard and soft skills to fit the role and company culture.
According to a Gartner report, “76% of HR leaders who completed Gartner’s 2022 HR Budget and Staffing Benchmarking Survey expect headcount to increase well into 2022, with turnover remaining high”. Given the global need for reskilling and upskilling, Andela will continue to offer Andela Qualify as a standalone developer assessment solution.
Seamless Global Payout Capability
Andela Pay manages all aspects of global payouts, currency exchange, and compliance in over 100 countries to ensure that technologists receive funds in a low-cost and timely manner.
Technologists are paid out directly in USD into a partner wallet of their choice – clients are thus insulated from foreign exchange risk. The Andela Pay partner ecosystem also runs OFAC checks and Know-Your-Customer reviews on contracted technologists as per applicable regulations to ensure compliance by all remote workers.
Enterprise HRM Integrations
Andela Connect provides integrations to popular Application Tracking (ATS) and Vendor Management Systems (VMS). With this release of the Andela Talent Cloud, integrations are available for Greenhouse, Beeline and Fieldglass.
These integrations allow clients to link job postings on their website or LinkedIn to instantly connect to the Andela Talent Cloud to begin the matching process against the Andela Talent Marketplace. Clients are able to streamline their recruitment process to source talent recommendations to hire quickly.
E-Business
AI Slows Down some Experienced Software Developers, Study Finds

Contrary to popular belief, using cutting-edge artificial intelligence tools slowed down experienced software developers when they were working in codebases familiar to them, rather than supercharging their work, a new study found.
AI research nonprofit METR conducted the in-depth study, on a group of seasoned developers earlier this year while they used Cursor, a popular AI coding assistant, to help them complete tasks in open-source projects they were familiar with.
Before the study, the open-source developers believed using AI would speed them up, estimating it would decrease task completion time by 24%. Even after completing the tasks with AI, the developers believed that they had decreased task times by 20%. But the study found that using AI did the opposite: it increased task completion time by 19%.
The study’s lead authors, Joel Becker and Nate Rush, said they were shocked by the results: prior to the study, Rush had written down that he expected “a 2x speed up, somewhat obviously.”
The findings challenge the belief that AI always makes expensive human engineers much more productive, a factor that has attracted substantial investment into companies selling AI products to aid software development.
AI is also expected to replace entry-level coding positions. Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, recently told Axios that AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white collar jobs in the next one to five years.
Prior literature on productivity improvements has found significant gains: one study found using AI sped up coders by 56%, another study found developers were able to complete 26% more tasks in a given time.
But the new METR study shows that those gains don’t apply to all software development scenarios. In particular, this study showed that experienced developers intimately familiar with the quirks and requirements of large, established open source codebases experienced a slowdown.
Other studies often rely on software development benchmarks for AI, which sometimes misrepresent real-world tasks, the study’s authors said.
The slowdown stemmed from developers needing to spend time going over and correcting what the AI models suggested.
“When we watched the videos, we found that the AIs made some suggestions about their work, and the suggestions were often directionally correct, but not exactly what’s needed,” Becker said.
The authors cautioned that they do not expect the slowdown to apply in other scenarios, such as for junior engineers or engineers working in codebases they aren’t familiar with.
Still, the majority of the study’s participants, as well as the study’s authors, continue to use Cursor today.
The authors believe it is because AI makes the development experience easier, and in turn, more pleasant, akin to editing an essay instead of staring at a blank page.
“Developers have goals other than completing the task as soon as possible,” Becker said. “So they’re going with this less effortful route.”
E-Business
Firm Uncovers $500K Crypto Heist Through Malicious Packages

Kaspersky GReAT (Global Research and Analysis Team) experts have discovered open-source packages that download the Quasar backdoor and a stealer designed to exfiltrate cryptocurrency. The malicious packages are intended for the Cursor AI development environment, which is based on Visual Studio Code — a tool used for AI-assisted coding.
The malicious open-source packages are extensions hosted in the Open VSX repository that claim to provide support for the Solidity programming language. However, in practice, they download and execute malicious code on users’ devices.
During an incident response, a blockchain developer from Russia reached out to Kaspersky after installing one of these fake extensions on his computer, which allowed attackers to steal approximately $500,000 worth of crypto assets.
The threat actor behind these packages managed to deceive the developer by making the malicious package rank higher than the legitimate one. The attacker achieved this by artificially inflating the malicious package’s downloads count to 54,000.
After installation, the victim gained no actual functionality from the extension. Instead, malicious ScreenConnect software was installed on the computer, granting threat actors remote access to the infected device.
Using this access, they deployed the open-source Quasar backdoor along with a stealer that collects data from browsers, email clients, and crypto wallets. With these tools, the threat actors were able to obtain the developer’s wallet seed phrases and subsequently steal cryptocurrency from the accounts.
After the malicious extension downloaded by the developer was discovered and removed from the repository, the threat actor republished it and artificially inflated its installation count to a higher number – 2 million, compared to 61,000 for the legitimate package. The extension was removed from the platform following a request from Kaspersky.
“Spotting compromised open-source packages with the naked eye is becoming increasingly difficult. Threat actors are using increasingly creative tactics to deceive potential victims, even developers who have a strong understanding of cybersecurity risks — particularly those working in the blockchain development field.
As we expect adversaries to continue targeting developers, it is recommended that even experienced IT professionals deploy dedicated security solutions to safeguard sensitive data and prevent financial losses,” commented Georgy Kucherin, Security Researcher with Kaspersky’s Global Research and Analysis Team.
The threat actor behind the attack published not only malicious Solidity extensions but also another NPM package, solsafe, which also downloads ScreenConnect. A few months earlier, three additional malicious Visual Studio Code extensions were released — solaibot, among-eth, and blankebesxstnion — all of them have already been removed from the repository.
E-Business
NITDA Reaffirms Commitment to 95% Digital Literacy by 2030, as UBEC Pledges Collaboration

Kashifu Inuwa CCIE, the Director General of the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), has reaffirmed the Federal Government’s unwavering commitment to achieving 95% digital literacy across Nigeria by the year 2030, with an ambitious milestone of 70% by 2027.
This disclosure was made in total alignment with the present administration’s priority areas of reforming the economy for sustained inclusive growth and accelerating diversification through industrialisation, digitisation, creative arts, manufacturing, and innovation.
Making this known during a collaborative meeting hosted by the Universal Basic Education Commission (UBEC), Inuwa highlighted the government’s strategic prioritisation of human capital development as central to its national transformation agenda.
“We started this journey in 2023 when President Bola Ahmed Tinubu came on board and he made it clear that economic diversification and inclusivity are part of the administration’s agenda,” he noted.
“And the president outlined this in 8 priority areas to achieve the vision, with priority number 7 specifically focused on accelerating industrialisation, digitisation, creative arts, manufacturing, and innovation,” he added.
Recognising the importance of digital fluency in achieving this agenda, he stated that NITDA is committed to investing in the digital empowerment of citizens through the development of the National Digital Literacy Framework (NDLF), a strategic blueprint aligned with international best practices.
He added that to tailor the framework to Nigeria’s specific needs, 6 core competency areas were incorporated to include device and software operations, information and data literacy, communication and collaboration, content creation, safety, and problem solving.
He explained that the framework would address all levels of digital fluency, from basic, intermediate to advanced levels, to make digital skills accessible to every Nigerian, from primary school pupils to working professionals.
According to Inuwa, despite data limitations, NITDA estimates that Nigeria’s digital literacy rate currently stands at 50%, up from 44% in 2021, based on extrapolations from the World Bank’s Better Life Report.
The NITDA DG disclosed that the agency has been working closely with the Nigerian Educational Research and Development Council (NERDC) in developing a curriculum for digital literacy, which can be infused into formal education. Stating that the visit is a continuation of NITDA’s ongoing engagements with key education stakeholders, including the Federal Ministry of Education, the National Universities Commission (NUC), and the Nigerian Educational Research and Development Council (NERDC), all aimed at advancing digital literacy across all levels of learning.
Inuwa also revealed ongoing collaborations with global platforms such as Coursera to train teachers using AI-powered lesson generation tools and provide scalable online training.
It is worth recalling that late last year, NITDA partnered with the Nasarawa State University in collaboration with CISCO in launching the Digital Learning for NSUK (DL4NSUK) initiative to enhance digital literacy in tertiary institutions, and equipping graduates with the skills needed to be digitally proficient and globally competitive.
While stressing that the entire process, from curriculum development to classroom delivery, would require a whole-of-government and whole-of-society approach, Inuwa said, “This is not a journey we can walk alone; we must bring everyone on board, education stakeholders, technology providers, state governments, and international partners.”
In response to the DG’s remarks, UBEC Executive Secretary, Hajiya Aisha Garba, confirmed that the Commission has officially received the digital literacy curriculum developed by NITDA and NERDC and has commenced internal review processes.
She acknowledged the curriculum as robust and forward-looking but stressed the need for simplification to suit early learners and teachers, citing challenges such as curriculum overload, limited teacher capacity, and inadequate infrastructure as key barriers to effective implementation.
She pledged that UBEC, in partnership with the State Universal Basic Education Board (SUBEB), will lead efforts to equip schools with computers and solar-powered infrastructure to support real learning.
“We’re committed to working with NITDA and NERDC to refine the curriculum, train teachers, and ensure effective delivery. Let us align the technical vision with grassroots realities to make a lasting impact,” she concluded.
To formalise the implementation of the meeting’s resolutions, a joint inter-agency committee was established to develop strategic plans that will ensure the effective rollout of the digital literacy initiative, to equip young Nigerians with the essential digital skills required to thrive in an increasingly dynamic and technology-driven global landscape.
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