Case Study: Attune Reduces Time Spent Interviewing through Long-Term Partnership

Attune is transforming small business insurance with a platform that simplifies and speeds up the process for small businesses to apply, get approved, get insured, and get stress-free billing and servicing.When they first partnered with Andela, Attune was growing fast and looking to spend less time interviewing and more time building their products. Today, with five Andela developers across three distributed teams, Attune has successfully decreased interview time and increased bandwidth to cover critical tasks.

More Bandwidth, Less Turn Over

Senior Software Engineer Chris Seltzer recalls Attune’s rapid growth. “There were a lot of tasks we simply didn’t have time for. A lot of smaller stuff that wasn’t broken or critical to the next launch just got pushed off.”With a hybrid distributed culture, Attune’s team was a combination of local and semi-remote employees and fully remote contractors. And yet, the company still couldn’t scale quickly enough. Part of the problem, recalls Chris, was that every six months, their expensive remote contractors would roll off, taking with them all the training and institutional knowledge Attune had invested.

Faster Hiring, for the Long-Term

With only one person to conduct interviews and oversee the hiring process, Attune couldn’t replace their contractors fast enough without sacrificing time and attention to critical work. “We weren’t getting enough candidates to meet our bar and we were looking at a shortfall,” Chris describes. “I can only spend so much time interviewing people. Otherwise, nothing else will get done.”Attune needed to spend less time hiring and more time building their products with highly trained, long-term developers.Not only did Attune want developers who could grow with their company, bringing drive and motivation to learn and adapt, the company really needed a partner who understood their company culture. Director of Product Management Eli Boseman wanted “more than an outsourcing organization where culture is just an afterthought.”

Top Candidates and Dedicated Partners

Attune hired four Andela developers to work under senior in-house developers, building out billing and payment functionality and creating new website features for customers managing their accounts online.Chris Seltzer describes Attune’s immediate bandwidth gains. “When you have that extra capacity on your engineering team, you get to focus on the more nuanced parts of making software—making sure you have good test coverage, that annoying bugs are fixed, and little design edits get done in a timely manner.”The partnership has delivered the kind of team Attune was hoping for. “Every developer here wants to be the best. Andela does a great job of screening out only the really top candidates on this continent.”Chris says, "When I think about Andela and their relationship with Attune, I view them not as one of our contractors, but as a long term strategic investment for our company. The potential payoff when you think about being able to have a globally diverse, distributed team, with tons of different mentalities, backgrounds, the ability to find engineers you can’t find in your current market - it's so huge and we just knew we had to be a part of this.Download the full case study here[link].