6 INSIGHTS FROM IT RECRUITMENT AGENCY UKRAINE

Ukraine is one of the leading countries in the world in terms of the number of qualified IT specialists. By the end of 2021, there were about 285,000 people working in IT in Ukraine. But a full-scale war has rocked the tech industry and adjusted like any other field. According to IT Research Resilience, as of May- June 2023, between 57,000 IT professionals have gone abroad. That is, today the approximate number of IT specialists in Ukraine is 228,000.

But this does not mean that recruitment agencies are no longer as relevant. Ukrainian universities are preparing strong graduates in computer science, and on average their number is increasing from 10 to 20% every year. As a rule, most of them would like to find a job with decent conditions and not worse wages, so you can find the right specialist without too much trouble. 

In addition to the level of qualification, you should also note the level of professionalism and logical thinking. Often employers set tasks that require additional resources and a non-standard way of thinking, which by the way can't be avoided in Ukrainians.

The Covid-19 pandemic and the quarantine that followed were a test for many companies. The crisis was a kind of "jump into reality," and how you landed shows the degree of preparedness for the difficulties that followed. 

This is where onboarding and adaptation came in. In general, the concept of onboarding implies that the employee is familiarized with the new work environment, the team, and the new culture. It is at the initial stage that an employee usually experiences stress, which lowers productivity, and as practice shows, correctly organized onboarding helps to increase productivity in the new environment by 70% and retain an employee by 82%. Adaptation, in turn, plays an important linking role in all of this. 

These two indicators helped assess the readiness of Ukrainian IT specialists for the new working conditions. At the beginning of the pandemic, close to 31% of Ukrainian recruiters thought that the speed of hiring remained almost unchanged, and Ukrainians quickly and easily adapted to the new conditions, a slight decrease was noted in 29.9% of cases, and 28.5% believed that the speed of recruitment by their agencies has greatly reduced. But such figures didn’t last long, only a couple of months from the beginning of the pandemic, and soon recruitment agencies began to receive streams of offers, but already in the new working conditions. This can only indicate that the level of adaptation and onboarding among Ukrainian developers is quite high, and they are easily ready to adapt to new working conditions in the future, having already had experience under their belt.

Attracting specialists from external sources has several indisputable advantages: positive experience and absence of undesirable contacts within the organization, reducing the cost of personnel training, as well as saving time for monitoring the labor market.  Finally, by attracting a successful IT specialist, you can inflict a tangible "blow" to your competitor. That is why more and more customers are using the services of a recruiter or a recruitment agency. 

If we are talking specifically about Ukrainian IT recruiting agencies, there are several differences from American agencies. It is no secret that American products are considered the "golden standard". But even here Ukraine is one step ahead. 

The first thing we would like to note is that among American recruiters the norm is an automatic or template interview - 10-20 minutes over the phone, and the lack of responses, especially to irrelevant candidates. Yes, this is the norm for American recruiting. In Ukraine, fortunately, not all companies adhere to this principle. Feedback draws attention to the recruiter and the client's company. Because sometimes irrelevancy is not obvious to the candidate and the candidate doesn’t understand that he/she is not suitable for the position. And if nobody answers and explains to him - he will never know the reason. Well, one of the main duties of the Ukrainian recruiter is to collect data from thousands of different sources, as well as the analysis that uses more than 150 criteria and parameters (and that doesn’t include the personal preferences of clients). Recruiters, with the help of a multi-grade system, can easily and accurately determine the level of value of the IT specialist on the market.  If the specialist accepts the estimate, the recruiter in turn quickly finds an employer that matches her/his needs. Thanks to such a system there is a time saving for all parties, which indicates a high level of professionalism.