Avado enables remote working for developers to solve recruitment challenges

Group CTO Mark Ridley admits recruitment difficulties in hiring Moodle developers, but found success by enabling remote working practises

Digital learning provider Avado has solved some of its recruitment challenges by enabling remote working amongst its development teams.

Despite some development cultures like Agile being facilitated by workers sharing the same physical space, Group CTO of Blenheim Chalcot (the venture accelerator under which Avado sits) Mark Ridley explained how to make remote working function just as well.

"Some of our recruitment has been quite challenging," explained Ridley, talking to Computing recently. "We use Moodle, a PHP application. It's relatively uncommon to find Moodle PHP developers in London. That's led us to find ways to more creatively embrace remote working."

He added that Moodle developers can be found more commonly in Brighton and in Scotland than in London. An inconvenient fact for north London-based Avado.

"But by being more flexible and designing all of our engineering systems to be capable of supporting remote work, partly for our existing staff, but then it also gives us a platform to hire developers anywhere. The question then is how do you build out the technology to have stand-ups, and retrospectives where you're doing that globally?

Ridley explained that the organisation has recently employed a new developer who divides her time between London and Spain.

"It's the next evolution of work, this concept of people working in different places and time zones. It gives you more flexibility in how you construct teams around projects. On the one hand I firmly believe that having physical boards with a team located at the same place is much better, but you can't always support that. So that makes finding someone like a Moodle developer difficult.

"We try to make sure that we are absolutely the employer of choice for Moodle in the UK and potentially worldwide. That's the ambition. So that means that we contribute back to the open source community, and have have the best working practises. We definitely want to be the place where Moodle developers want to work. It's a big ambition," he concluded.

Ridley also told Computing how Avado has implemented new Business Intelligence and CRM tools recently, with both selections driven by end user requirements.