Publicis Groupe

The positions were fairly typical, we needed front- and back-end developers, as well as a systems analyst for an internal Publicis project that our own development team was working on.

We had been trying to fill the vacancies on our own for about half a year. However, we had some difficulties in mutual understanding with internal customers who had misunderstood the situation in the market. Our colleagues had a strong feeling that it was not companies that were struggling for specialists, but on the contrary, specialists were standing in a queue trying to find at least some work. Also my colleagues did not take into consideration the fact that we are not a specialized IT company (still Publicis is first of all an advertising holding), and in this respect we are somewhat behind Yandex, Avito, Mail.ru and other technological companies.

Initially, the stated salary fork was lower than the market, while the requirements for experience and knowledge were quite high, which significantly narrowed the funnel and made the search more difficult. Despite the fact that we repeatedly discussed the situation with internal customers and proposed solutions to adjust the brief/fork, our efforts, unfortunately, did not lead to any results, and the relationship between the HR department and the development department became increasingly tense.

At this point, in early 2020, we decided to turn to IT recruiting experts who knew the market and could help us find the right candidates, and our colleagues in the development department supported this decision.

I had a selection of recruiting agencies that specialize in IT. From some agencies I had received offers of cooperation before, some I had found on the Internet myself. I identified about 5 agencies and approached them with an inquiry.

Star Staff were the first to respond, and we quickly made an appointment. The other agencies were much slower in replying, and I could not afford to procrastinate in choosing an agency, since I was practically living at work at that time and badly needed help. Many agencies were still in the negotiation stage when the meeting with Star Staff had already taken place and colleagues offered to start work promptly.

All IT-agencies offered about the same conditions: a similar rate, experience in working with large companies, experience in closing similar positions. But the guys had one advantage: due to my busy schedule it was almost impossible to get through to me, while my colleagues from Star Staff always succeeded, even if not the first time :) In my opinion, persistence is one of the key qualities of a good recruiter, so I decided not to wait long to choose, and we started working together.

It was enough for 2-3 candidates to take a closer look at each other and develop a common work plan. My colleague, who had been working on IT team vacancies for six months and knew all the specifics of our customers thoroughly, put together a fairly clear structure of a cover letter on the candidate, as well as the necessary list of questions for the phone interview. The Star Staff guys stuck to the template familiar to our customers as much as possible and provided detailed information at the end of the phone interview. As a result, the percentage of resume rejections by the client was reduced to a minimum.

Taking into account the wishes of the client and the specifics of the project, we had fairly clear requirements for both professional and personal qualities of the candidate.
Without going into technical details, we needed a person with experience in developing a large web-application (ideally from scratch). The specialists from small and medium-sized companies were the best fit for us, they had a sufficiently broad functionality and vision of the entire project. The point is that our development team is small, and therefore the functionality of each person is wider than in the product teams of large IT companies.

In terms of technology, the wish was that the person should be sufficiently flexible in his or her choice of tools. We have Java Enterprise, not Java Spring, which most java developers use. The team has a lot of experience with this version, and there was no desire or need to switch to something else. We only approached people for whom it didn't matter whether to use Spring or Enterprise.
From the soft skill point of view we needed a team player who could contribute other people's code, or who would be willing to share their code with others. Also, the team has its own traditions and rules: morning meetings, communal Friday nights, etc., which our candidate should have been prepared for in advance.

We also had some age limitations: as our experience showed, the best suited to the team were employees over 30 years old, for whom the priority was not career development, but stability, and who were not interested in frequent changes of work and switching from project to project, which sometimes happens with young professionals. We needed an experienced and matured professional. Taking into account all the wishes, we found that our position was suitable not only for a person in his 30s, but for a person in his 50s.

Looking for people of an older age is not exactly a standard story for us, especially taking into account that in the rest of the Publicis holding - which is more than 1000 people - the average age is 30 and a little, and in many teams it is up to 30 years old. During the prolonged search for an employee we understood that the most successful ones in our team will be the specialists who have a great experience in development, who seek stability and are ready to go through the long way of realization and launch of the project with us. And there are enough reasons to stay with us for a long time: a good social benefits, minimum of overtime, and an excellent team, most of which has been working on the project since the very beginning and knows all the nuances. The guys from Star Staff managed to find a candidate who fit all the criteria and really fit in well.

We have little experience working with agencies, but Star Staff impressed us as experts in the IT market and as people who work for results.

Since working with Star Staff, we were able to find common ground with our internal customer and reformulate the brief to close the position. On the HR Publicis side, we did our best to widen the funnel as much as possible, which Star Staff colleagues certainly helped with.

Besides Star Staff there was another agency that we started working with upon recommendation, but Star Staff proved to be more successful and we filled all the vacancies thanks to them.

It turns out that thanks to well-coordinated work with the guys from Star Staff, we gained more trust from our development department. Whereas previously our proposals to adjust the brief and expand the funnel were hardly taken into account or accepted with great difficulty, and our colleagues had doubts about our expertise, now internal clients listen to our recommendations and get more involved in the work on the positions.