Admitad

We've been working with STAR staff for about a year now to find Python developers, mostly middle and senior level guys. We're always looking for them, so we're not working with STAR staff on any particular project or position, but as part of our ongoing recruiting assistance.

Last year, 2019, the guys were looking for another system architect for us, filling a DevOps position, a front-end and python developer. 3 people have already been recruited to us by STAR staff, now we are waiting for another girl's decision.

We need an agency to help us, since we are physically unable to handle the entire market. If there is an opportunity to get this kind of help, why not? STAR staff looks where we do not look, in its own database, and activates those who are in passive search. We have different circles of interaction with them. Your recruiters show us those we don't see or haven't interacted with. Or they bring up people we talked to a long time ago, a year or six months ago.

In IT we divide the selection conventionally into junior ones and people with experience, i.e., middle and senior ones. Team leaders are rare, but they are needed, too. For junior positions, we look for them without any problems: 2 weeks, a month at most, to search and the position is filled. With middle and senior ones it is much harder, because our guys have more requirements and it is harder to fill these positions. We can search for a middle ones for 2-3 months, even 4. It depends on internal requirements. On the one hand there are businesses that want us to release features faster, on the other hand there are developers who are afraid to hire a programmer they are not sure about. So we try to strike a balance. We can look for a more powerful programmer, but it has to be a super-professional.

Before the pandemic, we had no remote workers at all. But here we had to move everyone to remote work at once, which was unusual. But in terms of hiring developers, the coronavirus had no effect whatsoever; we have been hiring and are hiring, and we are not leaving any positions. Some non-priority positions, such as assistant manager, have been temporarily removed, but the hiring in development has only increased.

The transition to a remote service was quick, but there were some difficulties. It was very unusual for many people in terms of having to organize their work from home so as not to overwork, to avoid burnout. But that's okay, now we have started to go outside, and we understand that it has become easier. A lot of departments have started to organize additional virtual coffee-points to communicate with the team, because otherwise there is only one-on-one communication. In the office you communicate with a lot of people, exchange news, it happens organically during the day, and now for this you need to carve out extra time.

And Zoom, of course, has rushed into our life :)

There is that, yes. But now the guys have it in second place. Of course, they still look at soft-skills, but they pay much more attention to hard-skills. Again, this has to do with business requirements. Management is trying to speed up development, something has to be sacrificed. We decided to sacrifice soft skills a bit.

My feeling is that our guys like such humble smart guys who are not too big in the head, but do not get cocky, and do not have an ego the size of a house. Usually they have a good education, like Baumanka or MEPhI. Such people try harder and do extra things, such as writing unit tests themselves. The ideal candidate is a humble genius. Everyone likes them, that's understandable, but there is not enough of them for everyone.

I sometimes think that we are a difficult client, even a problematic one. Not in the sense of communication and interaction, but in the sense that it's hard to fill positions, you have to try very hard, because we look at a lot of people ourselves, and it's not so easy to find the right person.

I can't say anything about it, because I hadn't worked at Admitad yet. I joined the company in the summer of 2019, and at that time Admitad had already been working with STAR staff for several months exactly. As I understood from the conversations, STAR staff came by acquaintance or recommendation, you and we chatted and realized that there was a mutual understanding and trust on a personal level. I think we decided to cooperate with you because of the similarity in terms of approaches to work.

In general, STAR stafff always starts quickly on a vacancy. But we have our own specifics, your guys don't look at hh.ru, because we look there. They look at other sources, where it often takes longer to get a person up and running. Under our conditions, they start quickly. And in terms of the quality of the candidates sent in, everything is good.

If you're alluding to "assertiveness," I'm very assertive myself. When I send my résumés to mine colleagues, I pull them all the time. And the person knows that if they don't look at it, I'll pull it again. So they're used to it by now and they get things done quickly. It's very organizing. So we don't have that problem that STAR staff doesn't get feedback for a long time.

I do not remember anything critical in our cooperation. Of course, there are some mistakes, but we are all human. There was a curious thing recently: your guys sent us a python developer we had looked at six months ago. Some mistake must have been made in the database. Almost word for word the same cover letter, the same resume. And I said, we interviewed this candidate six months ago, it's him, I remember! It's funny how that happened. But it's normal, it happens. There are no horrors, and there were none.

I'm used to it, and the guys at STAR staff work this way, so the recruiter calls the person first, talks about the position and the company, asks all the right questions, writes a cover letter based on this communication, and only then shows it to the client. And now it's cool that the guys themselves first evaluate the candidate and write a cover letter, because it happens that the resume is bad, but in fact the person has done cool things. Cover letters help a lot in that regard. And the more detailed and high-quality the letter, the better. I can see that for our IT people, that's what it's all about. And not everyone practices it, even internal HR people don't all do it.

Also, the STAR staff guys are quick to pick up on what we need in terms of hard and soft skills. That's why they ask for feedback as soon as possible. When we call on positions, they ask me about the project, tasks, and the type of person we need. In addition, the experience of cooperation plays a role, on new vacancies the first or second candidate is already close to what we need.

Outside of work issues, we also keep in touch. The other day Petya (Smirnov, who leads us from the agency side) sent me a webinar that STAR staff held for external personnel. It was an open webinar within the framework of recruitment training, about PHP, about different frameworks, it was very funny. Usually it's for internal use, but this time it was external, and the guys shared the recording with me.

Well, and the stickers in Telegram give me a good feeling :) The informality of the communication is very appealing.