Hello, Habre! My name is Tetyana Bogoslovska, I work as a recruitment manager for Fix Price, and today I would like to share my observations about the peculiarities of hiring IT professionals in 2024. Let’s talk about what they pay attention to during employment and how companies can interest them. And I will also tell you how some applicants try to trick recruiters.

Not a single social package: what do IT candidates pay attention to?

In my experience, recently IT specialists are primarily interested in the following when choosing a new place of work:

• atmosphere in the team. It is important for the acquirer that the manager has a friendly attitude, and that the relations in the team are ecological. Believe me, this is read even in an interview. Not all team leaders (especially among those who have recently become team leaders) know how to communicate with candidates, so we first conduct a briefing, and after the interviews we give feedback;

• technology stack. Another important factor in employment, however, it concerns primarily developers, and is not so important for analysts and testers;

• the very project to be worked on, its attractiveness from the point of view of development;

• remote work format. The vast majority of applicants expect that the company has the opportunity to work remotely;

• company accreditation as IT. I think there is no need to explain here.

And what about the salary and social package? Of course, this also plays a role, but decent salaries in IT are an ordinary phenomenon. Having several offers in hand, specialists can easily make a choice in favor of the company where the tasks are more interesting and a complete match with the team, even if the salary will be slightly lower.

As for the mode of operation, remoteness is the absolute norm for IT users. But we, for example, do not limit those who for some reason want to periodically come to the office. True, we have only about 5% of such employees in our IT departments, the rest work from home.

Where companies are looking for IT specialists today

One of the most popular channels for searching for specialists is hh.ru. But we are not limited to it and use other available tools, including thematic forums and chats, social networks, as well as specialized services — Linkedin and Habr Career.

If you need to close a “difficult” vacancy, the Boolean Search method helps. This is a method of searching by keywords using special tools that allow you to adjust the search output more flexibly.

Also, our company has a referral program “Bring a friend”, which many employees have come to love and periodically recommend this or that specialist to the company.

From creativity to development: which specialists are plentiful and which are in short supply

As before, there are quite a lot of professionals in the IT market who are more creative than technical, for example, UI/UX designers. However, there are also enough developers, with the exception of a number of “chosen ones”, which we will talk about below.

The biggest difficulties with system analysts: it sometimes takes months to find a good specialist. More and more companies come to the conclusion that such a person should be in the staff, because of this there is an increased demand for them.

Among other professions, I would like to mention Android developers and Opentext programmers. There are many of the first, but high-level specialists among the “androids” are in short supply. As for Opentext programmers, these candidates are even rarer and at the same time no less expensive.

Understanding everything: how we conduct interviews

First of all, we strive to make the recruiting process convenient and fast for candidates, so we try to conduct all interviews within a day or two after the first connection took place.

Separately, I want to say about the test tasks: since we decided to minimize them and give far from all specialists. The only specialty where we left full-fledged tests is UI/UX designers, because without them it is very difficult to evaluate design experience. Contrary to common notions among applicants that their test tasks will be used as “free work”, we give only those tasks that we have already completed. This allows you to assess the creative abilities of the applicants and the real level of skills.

We also offer short testing (for 15-30 minutes, depending on the level of specialist) to system analysts. As for developers and testers, we do not use test tasks here: it is much more important to see how a person thinks when answering the team leader’s questions. We ask developers to send a link to a repository on GitHub or an archive with the code.

Now about the communication itself. We try to create an informal atmosphere at meetings: tension and formality not only prevent you from concentrating on the work itself, but even repel you. And our task is to let the candidate go with the feeling that he wants to work at Fix Price.

By the way, we once had a case when the developer did not pass the technical interview, but at the same time the candidate dreamed of working with us and the same match happened between him and the manager at the interview. As a result, we offered him to brush up on hard skills (the future manager drew up a complete training scheme with useful resources for learning) and come back to us in a few months. Now this specialist works for us.

Funny cases at interviews

Now some curious cases. We recently had a tester try to get a job who wasn’t sure she would pass the interview, so she asked a friend to do the interview for her. As a result, he successfully coped with all the questions, liked the team and received an offer. However, a friend started working instead of him. The manager suspected something was wrong at the first work meeting – the new employee behaved completely differently than at the interview, hiding from the camera and sitting to the side. To confirm our guesses, we used a trick – one of our employees asked everyone to take a selfie on the camera and send the photos to the chat. After receiving the photo, we calculated the deception together with his manager and decided to part with the tester, because the trust in the person in the team was lost.

Another specialist was caught trying to work in three places at the same time, despite the fact that our vacancy meant full-time and high involvement in processes.

Of course, it also happens that candidates behave incorrectly even at the stage of the first conversation. IT professionals have a sense of humor and, if not looking for a job, can respond to a recruiter with a line from a song or a joke. In this case, there is very little chance that we will invite this specialist for an interview at any time in the future.

Tips

A supportive team atmosphere, intelligent colleagues and a leader who is a leader are what IT professionals expect from an employer and what they look for in an interview, in addition to salary and benefits package.

In order not to spoil the first impression of the candidate on the part of the team leaders, we hold small meetings based on the results of the conversations. For this, our eichars are present at the interviews, but do not interfere in the process, and then give feedback. Yes, we are gradually building a system in the company that minimizes the percentage of applicants refusing offers from us.

Of course, all this will not be effective if it differs from reality, so a developed corporate culture and ecological communication are something without which it is difficult to imagine business growth and development today.