IT jobs are mainly associated with great salaries, low unemployment and employees’ freedom to choose their employer. However, it turns out that connecting the right IT specialist with the right employer is not at all obvious, and the employee recruitment process itself is not without flaws. Michał Gąszczyk, CEO of Inhire – a platform for recruiting IT specialists, talks about the topic in more detail.
What are the characteristics of the IT labour market?
The IT job market is characterised by competitive salaries and high demand for IT skills, but still too few candidates, especially the most experienced ones. Another thing that is very characteristic is the speed of recruitment – good candidates disappear from the market very quickly, so companies whose recruitment processes are not efficient (i.e. they cannot close a recruitment in a few days) have big recruitment problems.
Both data from inhire and other job boards show that there is a regular increase in the number of employers looking for IT specialists in Poland. The high level of competition raises the stakes upwards, so that candidates can pick and choose from well-paid offers.
What does this mean for Western companies that care about Polish IT specialists?
It is a very good situation. Such companies can hire qualified employees locally at a lower rate than in their own country, and for our programmers such remuneration will still be attractive.
And what impact will this have on companies in Poland? It could be disadvantageous, for example, for software houses, which rely on rather low margins. In the future, there may be a situation where companies will have to change their current business models because of rising salaries.
What is the scale of unemployment in IT? Apart from frictional unemployment, can you identify other forms of unemployment in the technology industry?
It is difficult to talk about the phenomenon of unemployment in the technology industry. In practice, it may affect the least experienced candidates (juniors) because, with the transition of most companies to remote working, half of the offers aimed at these people have disappeared from the market, resulting in dozens of applications for each published position.
Candidates with several years’ experience are able to find a job basically the next day; of course, in their case, it is always a question of professional and financial aspirations. If the expectations of the candidates oscillate around the upper echelons of the employers, the competences of the candidates are thoroughly verified and employers want to be sure that a person who will be earning several tens of thousands per month will actually provide the company with commensurate added value. However, if the candidate is not aiming at offers with the highest forks, there are literally thousands of advertisements available on the market, so surely everyone is able to find a new project in a few days, regardless of specialisation.
What is the biggest problem when it comes to the IT job market? How does the inhire.io platform help you avoid them?
I think one of the biggest problems is still the lack of information on salary ranges in the job adverts. And although, according to our analysis in the IT Market Snapshot 2020 report, we can see an improvement in 2020 (There were 6% more ads of this type in Q4 than at the beginning of the year), it’s still not enough.
Often, companies’ internal policies do not agree to disclose such information, making recruitment processes longer and candidates reluctant to apply for such job offers.
What does inhire have to say about this? We decided to create an algorithm through which we match candidates’ financial expectations with employers’ capabilities, without having to make salary information public. This is the first such solution in our market and we have patented it.
In the past year, the labour market has undergone significant transformations, including talk of a shift away from the so-called ’employee market’, where the number of job offers was higher than the supply, giving the potential employee more freedom in choosing where to work. Can we speak of a similar phenomenon in the case of the IT labour market?
Although there was a drop in terms of the number of IT job offers published in Q2 due to the pandemic, a total of 34,000 offers were published in 2020, with the largest number appearing towards the end of the year, so it can be said that the IT market is still an employee market, especially in relation to more experienced candidates.
Aside from the increased number of adverts, what has certainly changed is access to a larger pool of offers for candidates living outside of the major conurbations. The introduction of remote working being so prevalent has meant that employers have opened up to candidates from all locations, bringing the rates on offer for so-called remote, in line with those that operate in the cities with the highest cost of living.
As a result, candidates can comfortably earn rates from the largest conurbations while living in locations with a much lower cost of living. This applies to offers from both Polish and foreign companies.
In your opinion, what factors could positively influence the effectiveness of IT recruitment?
For candidates who apply to employers themselves, certainly the speed and quality of the process has a huge impact on effectiveness. Still not all companies understand that candidates have a large choice of offers and do not want to wait more than a week to hear back from an employer whether their application will be considered or not.
Companies that employ professional recruiters (and the right number of them) generally close processes at an express pace and do not allow good candidates to drop out of recruitment processes simply because the process takes too long.
The ideal solution for most companies is to include hiring managers as early in the process as possible.
