Applicant vs employer: a fresh look at HR approaches

Recently, quite a few emotional posts have been published on the habr (for example, here and there ), the main topic of which was the level of claims of potential employees and the requirements for candidates by employers. As usual, opinions were divided, some believe that job seekers want a lot of money, but don’t know anything, while not wanting to learn new things, others say that companies are trying to get employees to work for food, and they don’t see young specialists point blank and mess with them do not want. Having studied the whole range of opinions, we decided to speculate on the reasons for the current situation and talk about what and how UIDG works in this regard.

Why do we need a student, better to find a superman

Any company is looking for job seekers with a combination of experience and enthusiasm. But such people are rare, and today the employer is often forced to cultivate some of these qualities of employees on their own. At the same time, many still prefer to hire already established, ready-made specialists, rather than spend resources on training employees “for themselves”. The plus here is obvious - it's cheaper. Of the minuses - in the long run there is a rather high probability of conflict situations caused by both an overestimation / underestimation of professional qualities, and misunderstanding at the interpersonal level. The reason for this may be unnoticed gaps in the knowledge of the applicant, and situations of the type “did not work out” within the team have not been canceled.

Obviously, hiring only fully-formed specialists and “stars” is somewhat reminiscent of patching holes on the road that cars drive along. In the course of work, such an employee will have to change something in himself, and to learn something again, and this is always more difficult than going through everything from scratch initially.

At the same time, today the level of specialization in IT is growing more and more, and there are many professions that did not exist a couple of years ago, universities simply do not have time to prepare highly specialized personnel. This naturally implies the lack of a huge number of specialists, the same interface designers. At the same time, many applicants for vacant places continue to keep their enthusiasm within the hobby, convincing themselves of the impossibility of changing the gauge into which they led, for example, studying at a university. The approach of such an applicant: “Yes, I like to study the logic of various services and sites, but for 6 years I have been unlearned as a project manager, why do downgrade and relearn?”

This logic is largely based on the belief that the employer in the field of IT needs only students and graduates of technical universities, which is for the most part a true, but too crude understanding of reality. However, as noted above, modern specialties in the field of IT (UI and UX in particular) are combinations of several basic disciplines at once, and few can afford to cover everything at once.

In general, we at UIDG consider, given the current realities of the labor market, that it’s easier for a good manager or PM to train analytic techniques, rather than leadership skills. It is better to take a person with experience in research in psychology, and then to teach him the specifics of the technical aspects of his work - it is much more effective.

And why are you better than other companies?

In the dispute, who is right, the applicant or employer, those who are on the side of the first ask a reasonable question: “do you want so much from a potential employee, and what can you give him yourself?” Indeed, very often when choosing a workplace, applicants come not only from the size of the proposed salary, but also from a bunch of other factors, such as the location of the office, the office itself (no one likes working in poor conditions), the possibility of a free schedule, etc.



And the point here is not so much in the democratization of orders and traditions in the company, but in a sober assessment of the situation. In the creative team (and the IT profession, of course, can be attributed to the creative), harsh procedures that are coming down from above are unacceptable, ideally, employees should be able to independently schedule their own time, plan deadlines, the composition of work, and so on. At UIDG, we went further, giving employees a real opportunity to influence the life of the company.

We are constantly gathering and discussing the current situation in the company - we are not only talking about work, but we are thinking about how we could improve processes, structure, and simply what’s new to buy in the office.

In addition, as already mentioned, employees themselves are free to choose their work schedule and have the opportunity to independently conduct the project from and to - if only the work was completed on time. If for effective work you need to work from home, then that is what you need to do, if you need to arrange a meeting in a cafe overlooking the Kremlin - why not. In addition, we have a good practice, when employees working on projects are also actively involved in the sales cycle (preparing commercial proposals, etc.) - we do not have a separate sales department.

The highest meaning of such a mix of different activities in a variety. People are not mechanical machines, having set them up once, you can get trouble-free production. They tend to get tired, bored and lose interest in what is happening around.

In order to somewhat reduce the negative impact of everyday routine, it also makes sense to get away from the “hard” composition of the project teams. Thus, on each new project, the employee works with new colleagues, which, firstly, makes it possible to work in different roles (consultant, specialist, negotiator) and in different areas (banking, tourism, games, public resources). And secondly, working with a new colleague who is quite possibly somewhat better than you is a new professional challenge and motivation for development.

Total

Summarizing, it can be noted that in such a “humane” approach there is no less sense than in “worked-out” processes and corporate policies (although these things are certainly useful).

Now all of the listed elements of soulfulness and self-government seem completely natural, however, we went to this state of things for several years and, of course, could not do without difficulties. The result that we have now, everyone is very satisfied. Summing up our reasoning, it is worth emphasizing the fact that personnel policy issues are rather vague and are decided by each company depending on the current state of affairs, and we do not believe that the way we do is the only right approach. Thank you all for your attention and good luck ^).

Posted by Ksenia Gerasimova, UIDG Executive Director.

PS This year our company turned 10 years old and we decided to coincide with this significant event a series of posts telling the story of the foundation, formation and development of the company. We post these texts on our blog on Blogger. If anyone is interested, then here are the first and second articles.

Pictures: explosm.net, theoatmeal.com, dilbert.com