Crossover believes that the talent in Pakistan should have equal opportunities when it comes pay etc. just anyone else in the world. Pakistan is no doubt filled with talented people who are always looking for ways to optimize that and perhaps earn as well.
After a successful drive in Punjab, Crossover organized a hiring tournament in Karachi on the 6th of May 2017 at the Marriot Hotel. This is the 12th hiring tournament held by Crossover, and the second one in Pakistan. They have held tournaments in Turkey, Cairo, and Russia etc.
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Atif Mumtaz, the Country Manager at Crossover speaking to IDG Pakistan said,
“Crossover is a very unique platform it offers the Pakistani talent to work with a global team. We only hire the top 1% of the cream, and to be selected at Crossover means that you really are one of the best. The Lahore tournament showed that Pakistan does have that top talent, in the eight people that were hired.”
Crossover has over 60 people working in Pakistan, with the goal to take that number up to 200. Through Crossover, the high-end people earn up to 200k dollars per year.
More than 300 programmers in Dot Net and Java technology applied in a highly competitive competition, whereby 70 people made it through, and were currently participating in the event. “We expect to hire a sizeable number of applicants in Karachi, more than we did in Lahore,” said Atif Mumtaz.
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In his message to the participants, Andy Tryba, Chief Executive Officer, Crossover said
“We’re planning to run more tournaments across Pakistan, based on performance of this tournament, we’re planning to hire over 200 senior software architects in Pakistan and bring an additional $20 million per annum worth of employment to Pakistan’s economy this year. I’m a big believer of Pakistani talent. Earlier this year, Crossover hired eight senior software architects in Lahore. Now it’s Karachi’s turn, I believe we had even better results here. Our journey in Pakistan may continue with Islamabad”.
Ali Arshad, from Crossover said, “At Crossover we believe that the best talent should not be restricted by regional boundaries. There is really good talent in Pakistan and that they should also be getting paid what someone is getting paid abroad. At this age we don’t believe in boundaries, because it is a global village.”
According to Ali, the main idea is to hire the maximum number of talent from Karachi and give them the opportunities to work with international communities and with international packages.
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Speaking on why platforms like Crossover are important for freelancers and techies in the local community, one freelancer participating at the tournament said, “There is a lot of saturation in the market in terms of growth and there are not a lot of financial benefits. Crossover is providing a very good salary, and they have a lot of work.”
Hassan Fahim, another freelancer speaking to IDG Pakistan said “I’m quite impressed with their [Crossover’s] methodology of working and how the distributed teams are working.”
Mohsin has been working as a software engineer through Crossover and at the tournament hopes to get the job for the Chief Architect. Speaking about his experience he said, “The timings are very flexible, you are signed a few tasks and you submit them when you are done with them and they give you feedback. The work environment is very good.”
The full day event was made out of multiple rounds, highly gamified and competitive process that finishes with a technical interview and on the spot job offer. At first round candidates were asked to be tested with their basic skills with a multiple choice test. The concept has been tested in Egypt, Turkey, Russia, Romania, Poland and Ukraine before bringing it to Pakistan.
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The second half of the tournament was focused on project assignments and coding challenges, the top candidates who passed these rounds were invited to the interviews. Technical interview winners were offered full time / remote jobs offer paying worth $100K/Year.
Crossover is present in over 98 countries, and always has projects available for people on their platform. In a question and answer session, it was revealed that the payment procedure at crossover is different from Upwork. There is no bidding on projects and the freelancer will get the payment into their Payoneer account without any tax deductions. The freelancer would have to file their own taxes, however tax is exempted on software exports till 2019 according to PSEB.
Image source: Crossover
