This October, OfferZen turns ten. In startup years, that’s a lifetime. A blur of wins, pivots, mistakes, and late-night Slack messages that somehow turned into a company that still exists, still matters, and, most importantly, still cares deeply about building things that make a difference.
OfferZen began with a single conviction: hiring developers was broken. It was slow, opaque, and full of noise. For some reason, the market still used the same recruitment process from 50 years ago — everyone hated it, but no one was doing anything about it.
Our founders, Malan and Phil Joubert who are engineers themselves, decided to fix it. They built a marketplace that matched high-intent developers with companies who actually wanted to hire them. That idea, and our values of start with the customer, help others win, stay hungry, still run in our DNA today.
But somewhere along the way, as we scaled and re-invented, I realised we’d started confusing motion with momentum.
When growth started to feel like drift
I was hired as VP Marketing in 2021 to lead our expansion into Europe. The world had gone remote, hiring demand was booming, and it felt like the perfect time to scale a good thing.
We built fast, hired fast, and launched in a few EU regions. Then, in 2023, we launched a new unlimited subscription model that was a great fit for some of our companies.
But by mid-2023, everything went south. Our strategy in Europe just wasn’t working. We lost almost half our companies trying to move everyone to the unlimited subscription model. It was brutal. The data was right there, but we were changing and scaling so many things at the same time that we didn't pause long enough to let the signals sink in.
We’d stopped listening closely enough.
We were optimising for efficiency instead of empathy. We were chasing growth rather than grounding ourselves in why OfferZen existed in the first place: to help people and teams hire better, not just faster or cheaper.
The hardest part was realising this was a cultural correction.
There's a moment in these periods of rapid scale when everyone is drinking the kool-aid, and the energy is driven by a shared assumption of success that takes your eyes off of what's really going on.
We’d lost some of our startup discipline — the habit of battle-testing ideas in the real world before scaling them. We had to get that back.
From scaleup to startup mode
When I joined OfferZen, we were deep in scaling mode. Everything — our team, our data models, our roadmap — was built for volume. The question behind every project was: How do we make this work at scale?
When the market shifted, that mindset stopped serving us. We had to unlearn scale and return to precision — obsessing over the specific problems worth solving and experimenting our way toward better answers.
That meant hard, structural changes. We replaced engineering managers with tech leads. Our CTO moved into an individual contributor role. We shifted from “what’s the best long-term solution?” to “what’s the smallest, fastest way to learn something useful?”. Some people who joined for the scale-up journey left when that mindset changed.
I told the team openly: our new priority was stabilising the business. It would take time, and it wouldn’t always feel exciting.
This transition was tough. Before OfferZen, I’d spent 11 years scaling 2U – joining at 80 people and leaving at over 6,000. My biggest strength has always been turning something hacky into a machine. But suddenly, that playbook didn’t apply. I had to learn how to build a new machine, not optimise an existing one.
I read obsessively and asked for advice from people smarter than me. And I forced myself to admit where my instincts were no longer helpful and instead empowered others to lead where I couldn’t.
When the hiring slowdown met the AI wave
By late 2023, the hiring market had cooled dramatically: more applications, fewer open roles, and so much noise. Then AI arrived and rewrote the rules overnight.
It was a strange paradox. Everything was moving faster, but it somehow became harder to know what good looked like. Hiring was still broken – just in a more complex way. Companies no longer needed access to talent; they needed clarity. Who’s genuinely skilled? Who’s AI-fluent? Who can actually deliver?
So, in 2024, we stopped. Paused. And went back to the fundamentals.
This was the turning point. OfferZen couldn’t just be a marketplace anymore. We had to become a partner — helping companies source, screen, and evaluate talent by leaning on our blend of human expertise and AI-powered tech working in tandem.
As we rebuilt, one question kept surfacing: How do we make OfferZen more useful to companies who need flexibility and real tech expertise — not just access to developers?
That thinking led to the creation of two new service divisions with new offerings: OfferZen Embedded and OfferZen Contracting.
We realised that some teams needed more recruiting firepower inside their business and others needed flexible, low-friction ways to augment their teams with South African engineers. So we built both.
Through Embedded, we place our own talent partners inside customer teams — running sourcing, screening, and interviews end-to-end using our tech and AI tooling. With Contracting, we help global companies hire vetted South African engineers on flexible 12-month contracts, giving them world-class capability without the overhead.
Together, these models helped us solve more of the problems our customers face in tech recruitment: finding and vetting exceptional engineers.
A new chapter: Season 2
Today, OfferZen looks very different. We’re smaller, 67% smaller in fact, but sharper than ever. We’re building an ecosystem, not a single product:
- Marketplace – still the best place for South African developers to connect with hiring companies.
- Contracting – helping global and local companies hire South African talent flexibly and confidently.
- Embedded – placing our own talent partners inside customer teams to manage recruitment end-to-end.
If Season 1 was about building a marketplace, Season 2 is about building momentum. The kind that starts with clarity of purpose and is built on innovative technology and unreasonable hospitality.
What comes next
As AI reshapes software and hiring, one thing is clear: the winners won’t be those who adopt it first, but those who adopt it best.
For us, that means doubling down on what made OfferZen work from the start: staying close to our customers and the developer community, experimenting boldly, and helping others win.
We still believe that talent is evenly distributed, but opportunity isn’t. We still believe that South African engineers are world-class and deserve a global stage. And we still believe the best way to help them is by building human-centred technology that amplifies, not replaces, their craft.
Season 2 is our chance to rebuild with intention. To prove that simplicity scales better than complexity. We’re not chasing the loudest hype. We’re here to build something that lasts and that genuinely helps people build and join thriving teams.
To everyone who’s been part of this journey – our customers who’ve trusted us through the pivots, and the developer community that’s shaped us from day one — thank you. OfferZen exists because of you. Your feedback, patience, and belief in what we’re building have shaped us for the better.
Here’s to the next chapter and to building it together.