Samolet Development

With Star Staff we work on IT people hiring, mostly front-end developers, middles and seniors. We don't look at juniors. Last quarter, four people came to us from you.

We have a pretty big IT department, about 150 people. "Samolet" is a digital developer, we have our own products, we write our own software. We want people at the construction site to walk around with tablets.

In terms of technology, we don't have any specifics. There was one vacancy for a DBMS using some old technology, but everything is modern. We write in React, in Python. Of course there are also 1C people, but in general there are no specifics.

However, in terms of the market we are perceived primarily as developers. We are not Yandex or Sberbank. Despite the salaries in the market and good conditions, it is certainly problematic for us to compete with IT-native companies.

Because of the speed. My IT department may have 20 openings at a time, and I can't afford to look for people for a long time.

I now work with three IT agencies, they have bases, so they work out trivially faster. Sourcing, working with social networks, scoring resumes is a big time commitment. These things need to be done, and I don't have that resource. If you give an internal recruiter 10 vacancies, he will not find the right amount of candidates in a short period of time, as agencies do.

In terms of hard and soft skills in general, yes, they are quick to understand and show us what we need. Where extra briefing is needed, we do it.

I won't hide it, I wish I could just write the position, and the guys had enough of that to give only quality candidates. For example, that's how the selection of top management works. No one there will brief you in detail. There is only the first interview and that's it, no repeated introductions. Ideally the agency would like to know me and my products so well that when I write "this team needs a back-end developer", the agency would not need to brief, they would already understand who they are looking for and run to do it. And only to brief at some point, if it is very necessary. Speed is very important to me.

But nobody has that. Only one top agency does.

Star Staff often works "according to the classics": the better you brief, the better the result.

I have a peculiar way of talking to people I know very well. I can be harsh, I can say, "I need it urgently, do whatever you want, but I need it tomorrow." And the guys take it calmly, they know that I have a business task. I like the fact that there is trust and understanding between us. Sometimes we give a job to Star Staff right away, and we don't even lead ourselves.

In terms of the process, we have found the right way to work together.

Particularly valuable to me is that Star Staff doesn't try to get through to [my internal] customers. Where necessary, we are always ready to connect the right people to a brief or an interview, but there is no need for an agency to try to make "direct contact," especially behind my back. I don't want to set up new communication processes in order to be aware of the communication between my client and the agency as it relates to my work.

I've seen cool greetings from Star Staff, recruiters' dictionaries that I've even sent to my recruiters to learn. That's awesome!!! I'm impressed with this approach to gifts when it comes more through learning, through something useful to look at or read. I also liked when the guys sent in a collection of jokes about customers and recruiters. For me, this is much more valuable than a conditional bottle of champagne and candy.

Star Staff's presence in the professional information field. I know, for example, that there is Tatiana Aqua, who is one of your key people in recruiting. She runs a good blog on Facebook, talks about hiring tips and tricks. I even said to my recruiters, "look, there's a Star Staff executive out there talking about the profession in a cool way."

But I was the one who went out and signed up because I am good at finding information on the internet. But Star Staff doesn't talk about it, so for now I associate it only with the closing of my positions. I do not see you on Facebook, you are not in my professional information field.

That said, I can see how relationships are being built, how the guys are trying to make them democratic and open. For example, the guys realized that I was more comfortable communicating on Whatsapp than on Telegram, and they communicate with me there. And I feel very comfortable in the sense that they have adjusted to me.

Now all of our IT staff will move completely to remote work. Before that, they were 100% in the office. We will take developers from other cities, the funnel will expand.

The transition was fine. There were difficulties with the infrastructure, because nobody had laptops. And HR stuff too, in terms of document flow. But on the whole we transferred everyone to remote work in one day. We assess the change positively.

The other day we held an online conference for 600 people. According to the results of the survey "How do you like working remotely?" about 60% said they wanted to stay remotely, 40% - that they would like to be able to come to the office occasionally.

There was only one unexpected thing: during the quarantine one BI-analyst came to us, but he could not adapt and left. So now we pay more attention to the newcomers, they are more difficult.

In terms of hiring we are also doing well. We even decided to increase the staff during the covid. First we froze the hiring for open positions, and then we unfroze it and decided to fill them anyway. I'm taking out 20 people a quarter, 10 positions were successfully filled in June, that's a lot for the company. That said, there isn't a lot of turnover, it's mostly staff expansion. That's a great result.