Any IT company is faced with a shortage of personnel, and the resolution of this issue is traditionally considered difficult. Many companies attract students of Moscow universities to work, and also hunt employees from other structures, but today we want to talk about another practice, which in our case has been more effective.
Developers are always needed, and if you don’t belong to the number of freelancers working only remotely, as well as on special or individual projects, then for many, the path to a software company looks like this: moving to a large city with advanced IT expertise, submitting a resume to various companies and choosing your new job in fierce competition.
Companies generally use a symmetrical approach: they open their representative offices or branches in places where there are already ready personnel, and begin to look for contacts with universities, attract students to their internship programs or even conceal, entice trainees and employees from competitive structures. Until recently, this way of working was considered almost the only possible one, but literally over the past three years we, at
NORBIT (part of the LANIT group), have been convinced that a completely different approach can be applied to development offices.
Small town practice
In cities where the IT landscape has become very diverse and the number of companies engaged in hiring developers has increased, the opening of representative offices has become not very profitable.
Salaries have become almost Moscow, the cost of living is quite high, and universities are already “spoiled” by various offers and want to arrange their graduates only to the most eminent companies, and they treat the new trainee programs with great skepticism. In addition, personnel shortage, which comes to such regions after the capital rates and methods of work, leads to the same battle for the best specialists. And why is the new office in the region better than the Moscow one? In order not to get into such a situation, we formulated four criteria that were most important for finding the optimal office location.
- The city should not have too many ready-made IT personnel, the competition should not be too high, and the market should not be saturated to the level of leading IT centers.
- The presence of educational institutions with specialized specialties should be complemented by interest from the teaching and professors.
- The average salary in the region and the standard of living should be lower than in capitals and megalopolises. This allows you to recruit more specialists and solve larger problems with the same budgets.
- The time zone of the target city should not be too far from the location of the headquarters, where the entire management of the company is located, so that we can work as a single mechanism. It is also necessary that managers could quickly get to the new office from Moscow.
In our experiment, we encountered several surprises.
First, it turned out that some regional universities are not just cooperative, but are looking forward to it. Therefore, our intern program was accepted with a bang, and the teachers were ready to adjust the course and timetable in order to provide their students with more opportunities. But one should not think that this will happen in every institution of higher education — we have eliminated one of the cities precisely because of the high level of bureaucracy in the leading educational institution.
A sourceAnother discovery is the interest of young professionals themselves in career growth and development. As the meetings with the leaders, who we held weekly, showed, the guys want to work in their city and live in comfortable conditions, but only with opportunities for career and professional growth. That is, the development office becomes more efficient and more attractive for work if it solves more complex tasks and works together with the center as “one whole”.
Thirdly, it turned out that the salary above the average in a bit remote from the capital or from another innovation center leaves the employee with much more opportunities than the standard Moscow wage for the visiting specialist, who in this city has neither housing nor relatives. Therefore, we began to receive requests for translation from those people who still live not in their hometown, especially since all the employees of the new division received the standard “Moscow” social package.
What other "chips" can attract employees?
Many specialists of one of our new offices are sporting lifestyle. The number of cyclists, climbers, as well as those who like to go to the gym during lunch is such that the authorities thought about increasing the number of showers. So we picked up a new office, taking into account the needs of IT athletes, and the developers were able not only to live in a city convenient for them, but also lead a healthy lifestyle.
A sourceHR policy. How we started
We started by choosing a leader for a new office. I needed an initiative person with good expertise, high potential and burning eyes. After studying dozens of candidates in the right region, we found an active IT specialist who was ready to develop the team, collaborating with universities and launching internship programs.
In this case, it took us only two months of training to immerse it in our development processes, and the future branch leader began the first trainee program at the university.
“I remember very well how we started. It was a huge office of 200 square meters next to the local university, and at first I was alone in it. It was a very strange feeling - to come to this empty space, where even the Internet was not held, and to engage in interviews with students. Then there were more people, and the office began to come alive in the eyes, ”recalls Dmitry, the head of one of the regional offices of NORBIT.
At first, 9 people became interns for the company, and 7 of them came to work in a new office, which was conveniently located near the university. Over the next two years, the number of interns increased to 30, and most of them remained to work in the local office of the company. By the way, employees from the experimental branch showed one of the highest results of certification tests, which refutes the prevailing opinion about the cardinal superiority of Moscow universities over regional ones.
We at NORBIT are sure that every employee should feel like a part of a single company, and therefore company managers from Moscow regularly came to the planning meetings in the new office. In conversations with managers, new employees spoke about their expectations and existing problems. In this dialogue, we managed to fully integrate the new team into the company's business processes. And as long as the region maintains the necessary working conditions, the number of interns will grow. If the place “loses” its attractiveness, we will find new opportunities in the Russian open spaces.
Comfortable living conditions in the region and low wages as a whole allowed us to create conditions for interested specialists from neighboring regions to also move to a new office with the provision of housing and a full social package.
Since the internship took place at the university, the parents of graduates did not see the difference between the dean's office and the new office. One time they even called us to find out why children linger and if they don’t do what they want.
Potential for regional development
In many leading universities there are internship programs for various companies, and cooperation with new players in the IT market is already taken for granted.
There is competition among leading companies for companies, and the level of wages is high, reducing the attractiveness of these regions for companies aiming to do business, that is, to earn money by creating products with lower costs.
Meanwhile, there are many regions in Russia where there are universities open for cooperation and where there are guys who want to connect their lives with IT and would be willing to stay in their city, where it is easier to raise a family, it is cheaper to provide for themselves and their children, but have to go to the capital or another center. However, if we open an office, then practice shows that a salary increase of 30–40 thousand is completely eaten up by the need to rent an apartment, and a higher standard of living makes this salary even less than in his native city.
Therefore, we are confident that the change of the HR paradigm and the search for personnel in various cities of Russia creates a condition for the distribution of IT expertise across Russia and the formation of competitive products for the domestic and global market. And for young IT professionals, this is a good chance to work in more comfortable conditions and get the necessary experience right in the learning process, even if they don’t study at a leading Moscow university.