Going Remote with DaCodes’ Mauricio Moreno

This episode, DaCodes’ co-founder and CEO, Mauricio Moreno, talks about how he grew a company to over 50 employees, how staff responded to moving to remote working, and the benefits of hiring junior positions remotely.

Mauricio Moreno is one of the Co-Founders at DaCodes, a software boutique specialized in App & Web Development, UX/UI Design, and Digital Transformation for Enterprises and Start-Ups. Here are a few of the topics we’ll discuss on this episode of People Analytics:

• Building a mobile app development company for third-party clients in Mexico.
• Growing a company to 50 employees working in a physical office.
• The challenges of working remotely and how to overcome them.
• The benefits of remote hiring.
• How artificial intelligence will revolutionize HR practices.
• How generative AI tools can be used to create titles, summaries, and timestamps for podcast episodes.

Resources:

• DaCodes
• StaffGeek

Connect with Mauricio Moreno:

• LinkedIn

Connect with the host:

• Lindsay Patton on LinkedIn
• Lindsay Patton by Email

Quotables:

• 13:00 – “We started experimenting, bringing experts from outside the company to give meet ups, to give talks, to give presentations. We started doing a fitness challenge for the company remotely. So we started exploring a lot of activities, virtual activities to engage the people and the, the, the coders that were working with us before Covid, before, like when we were working in an office already had the codes culture on their, on their mind, on their heart. The challenge was to put that same culture on the new people that we were onboarding virtually, that people that never met or knew the office space that never worked in person with everyone. So that was a challenge.”
• 14:30 - "A lot of people is more productive working from home. So we just need to make a system, to have a fast evaluations of the productivity, of the attitude of the people of their ways of working from home and, to keep the ones that are great and the ones that aren't. They can work in a physical office in other company. Right. But, it's a challenge you lose some things, but you win some new things if you are open to do the switch.”
• 15:49 - "I have not one interview, but have five interviews with different people. Maybe the first one is with the HR department or, or with the recruiter then with the manager, then with another manager and maybe with the CEO and the traditional ways to do that in person, right? Of, in a physical office in a physical space. And we were doing in person interviews. So we were spending maybe two hours from the time that the candidate came to the office or got to the office and then make the coffee and make the desk beautiful. And make everything perfect for the interview. And then make, have some chatting, have some gossip before the formal interview, then do the interview then I think in average, you have between one and two hours for candidate. And when you do virtual interviews or remote hiring, you can do interviews. You can do the first screening of maybe 25 minutes. Right. And also you can see that if the during the first 10 minutes, the candidate is not what you were looking for, you can go a little bit faster. You can tell the candidate that he's lacking some of the skills that you need or some of the experience that you need. And you can end the interview quickly if, when you're in person, you cannot do that. “
• 21:17 -  "But then when you open up to different cultures, to different countries, even to different cities, inside Mexico people is very different. So when we open up to different talent from different countries, you start getting a bowl of fruits with not only with apples, but with bananas and with maybe a watermelon over there, maybe oranges, so you start getting this diversity, this mix that it's great for the company people, software engineers mainly, they like to meet new people from other countries to see what they talk about. 
• 33:18 - "Having generative AI on your Google Drive, you can just tell the Google AI bot, Hey, give me the report of, I don't know, something with all these documents I have in here. Or give me the, I've been exploring a tool this, you will like this one for the podcast, which is you can, you just upload the MP3 file or the MP4 file to the program, and it gives you instantly. It gives you the transcript. Okay it selects it, it knows which speaker is who, who is who. And so it segments the transcript by speaker. And then you can, you just push a button that says AI generate AI, and it generates like 20 blocks of content from the options for the podcast name or podcast title for this episode to the description or the summary of the episode to the bio of the speaker, to the time, the timestamps of the podcast with all the topics that were talked during the timestamp questions and answers that were talked during the episode. So it is crazy what is happening. And I think in the next three months, we will have a lot of good tools.”