Varsha Venugopal

Also possibly liaise with external tech providers and tech-focused funders as needed.

And finally, there is the whole data security and broader regulatory standards and norms around transparency.

And we need someone on the ball who can ensure we are meeting those requirements.

What we think we need from this person is that, A, absolutely, you are motivated by the satisfaction of building something great and are passionate about this opportunity to see these solutions immediately have an impact.

The bit about years of experience we think is not that essential.

I think experience in the design and implementation of software solutions is key.

You may have done it in a large organization or not, but we do think if you have built something in a startup environment or have single-handedly completed some impressive side project, or you have some project lead experience in a software team, all of that could be quite useful and relevant for our role.

Yeah, I think it quite often depends on the role.

I think for some of these technical roles, you'll obviously need those particular hard skills, whether it's on technology, on M&E.

But for some of these other ones, like this business development role we are hiring, the key skill is someone who can do scientific writing.

So just someone who is sharp and can get on with it and is basically not somebody with strong technical skills in any area or development and health background.

I think for some of these roles like M&E that we may be hiring, there would be a requirement that they do have a development background and experience because it just makes it so much easier to understand the context on the ground.

And if they already have run a randomized trial or they understand how some of this works, that's super useful.

I think one big thing for us is we work quite hard to be evidence-based in our hiring systems.

It's still a process we're trying to learn from.

We try to minimize our implicit bias and focus carefully on candidates' skill and fit for specific roles.

So for instance, focusing on our test task outcomes rather than too much evidence on years of experience.

It's still a work in progress and we need to see where we land with some of this.

I would say more than we would like at the moment, but the way we also justify it is, one, we are learning so much from this process because it's all a lot of experimentation for us.

So this idea of, especially with India, to go for large quantities and then figure out a way to have questions up front to funnel that, I think seems to be working out.