Recruitment in a Booming IT Market

It is 2021, and the IT industry is booming. There are plenty of IT jobs available, and new jobs are being created in the industry at record rates. Google is investing $7bn in new facilities and planning to recruit up to 10,000 people across the United States this year, for example. It should be easy to recruit for any open positions. Trouble is, filling the hundreds of IT roles currently open isn't easy. The reason? There are far more jobs than candidates able (or willing) to accept those roles. 

Djinni, one of the top IT recruitment platforms in Ukraine, reported that there were 5,823 open positions and 21,269 candidates registered on their website in July 2020. In July 2021 however, the picture is quite different. The job offers have risen to 21,985, while the number of candidates stands at 15,695.

Let's delve into this conundrum and explain the root causes, and what can companies do to solve this recruitment problem.

Too many offers, too few candidates

There currently are hundreds of open positions from the European and American markets in Ukraine. Demand for talented, hard-working people is rising fast. Yet, Recruiting teams across the country are having a hard time finding the right talent for the right job. Why does this happen?

There currently is a critical shortage of senior specialists in the IT market. Demand for software engineers has steadily increased in recent years as a result of global digitalization. Junior roles fill quickly due to the wide availability of newly graduated talents, but senior positions are much harder to recruit for.

• There's the issue of proposal weariness. On average a senior candidate receives around 20-30 job offers per day. If we extrapolate this to office hours only, it's more than 3 offers per hour. Too many offers, in other words. Compared to January, recruiters almost doubled their activity, but the response from candidates is declining. On average, the response to offers ratio dropped from 62,5% to 27%. 
  

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Covid-19 prompted changes in candidates’ behavior and expectations

The pandemic has caused significant changes in everyone’s life, and has also sparked changes on the offshore development markets, including Ukraine: 

• The salaries have grown significantly. The reason? When working remotely Software Engineers can take offers from the richest economies on the market, which creates an even playfield around the globe. A remote worker does not mean a cheap worker.
  

• Candidates are wary about the Covid-19 situation and prioritize stability much higher than pre-pandemic. 

So what's the solution to all this?

There is no simple solution to these emerging problems. However, we have created a guide to help you speed up the hiring process and make it as smooth as possible:

• Set realistic hiring time frames.   

• Increasing current staff’s salaries. This may sound like an obvious truth, but a lot of companies engage in overly cautious cost-saving measures. While this may bring short-term savings, the long-term implications are not good, as senior employees might get better offers elsewhere, and onboarding a new employee is costly, both in terms of money and time.
  

• The new reality where remote working is not a benefit offered by the company, but a new norm. Be flexible in terms of where you hire. If you master the asynchronous workflows your business will benefit in the long term.

• Provide feedback about a candidate's performance within 24h of the interview taking place. ​​

• Be responsive and collaborate with recruiters, communicate why the candidate might not be the right choice. It will improve the quality of the next candidates. 

• Reduce the interview process to two interviews, and preferably one. The entire process can be condensed into one interview involving all stakeholders, taking no longer than 3h. 

• Consider making an offer to the candidate during the interview, if all stakeholders agree. There is no need to send the candidate home and wait one or two days to make an offer if there was consensus about suitability during the interview anyway. 

• Whenever possible, companies should hire candidates whose personal goals overlap with corporate goals. Creating a synergistic relationship between employer-employee, in which both parties' objectives match, creates a positive work environment and boosts staff retention.