Interview by Beata Socha
Source: Warsaw Business Journal, Number 02/03 (43), February/March 2018
The IT market has never been as competitive when it comes to talent hunting. How is recruitment different in this highly technical industry, where job offers rain down on candidates every day? WBJ asked Tomasz Bujok, co-founder and CEO of No Fluff Jobs, an innovative ad portal for the IT industry.
WBJ: The disproportion between IT and other industries in terms of pay scale is enormous. Is employee shortage the main driving force hiking up salaries in the sector?
Tomasz Bujok: Working in IT requires highly specialized knowledge, which in turn means that studying computer science is also not easy. IT companies charge high fees for their services so that they can provide sufficiently high salaries to their employees. Furthermore, a lot of software engineers decide to work remotely for international corporations, which – when calculated in PLN – can offer much higher pay, further increasing the upward pressure on salaries in IT.
WBJ: Do you think that software engineers’ salaries will continue to increase at the current rate?
TB: Yes, there is a shortage of some 50,000 programmers in Poland right now. In the EU the shortage is several hundred thousand. Both the employee deficit and increasing IT fees will maintain the upward pressure.
WBJ: In which specializations is the shortage most severe?
TB: It is definitely easiest to find Frontend specialists. In the Polish market, there is a deficit in Fullstack and DevOps, as well as Cloud Software. Then there are niche technologies, such as C++, Erlang, Fortran etc. that also see significant talent shortage.
WBJ: Is the recruitment process in IT substantially different than in other industries?
TB: First and foremost, the IT market is an employee’s market. It is recruiters and employers who have to compete for the best employees, not the other way round. Good IT specialists receive at least a few job offers a month. This makes them very challenging candidates with very high expectations – not only about the job, but also about the recruitment process itself. They expect recruiters to know the industry well enough, including technical terms. In order to attract candidates, HR departments need to ensure the highest level of recruitment, because when deciding which offer to choose, the company image could become the deciding factor.
WBJ: How many vacancies are filled through headhunting and how many through the regular recruitment process?
TB: It depends on the company profile. IT specialists don’t like headhunting for a number of reasons. They get annoyed when recruiters don’t know the basics of the industry and details about the project in question. Recruiters also often spam candidates with job offers that don’t match the profile of the specialist. IT people know how valuable their time is, so they don’t like to see it being wasted.
WBJ: What do IT specialists look for when reading a job ad??
TB: They are no doubt the most interested in pay opportunities. In an industry which has been an employee’s market for years, specialists can sift through job offers and pay is usually the reason why they decide to apply for a job in the first place. Secondly, they expect a very precise job description. An engineer wants to see the specifics: what programming languages and technologies the candidate should know to do the job. They also appreciate information about the project, employment form and technologies being used. Many specialists also look at home office possibilities and the location of the company office. A recruiter who wants to respect the candidates’ time should not only include such info in the ad, but also make sure it is clear and transparent. That is what we offer at No Fluff Jobs – all the information a candidate will look for.
WBJ: How exactly are job ads on No Fluff Jobs different from regular job portals?
TB: No Fluff Jobs was created with IT specialists in mind and the form we have created suits their needs perfectly. Ads on our portal only contain information relevant to the job in question: pay scale, technological stack and project methodology. All job offers on our portal have the exact same structure, which makes comparisons very easy. Some of the information is given in key words, some in graphical form so that reading the ad should not take more than 15-20 seconds. IT people don’t like lengthy, descriptive ads they usually find on other job portals. They expect to get all the relevant job info from the ad itself because they value their time. So do we, and that is why we’ve created a form which allows that.
Glossary
- shortage – deficyt
- to hike up – gwałtownie ciągnąć w górę
- upward pressure – presja na wzrost
- substantially – znacząco, istotnie
- severe – dotkliwy
- vacancy – wakat
- to get annoyed – być zirytowanym, złościć się, odczuwać dokuczliwość
- sift through – przebierać w (czymś)
- pay scale – siatka płac
- technological stack – zespół rozwiązań informatycznych, w technicznym żargonie informatyków: “stos technologiczny”
