How to correctly evaluate a job offer

The standard probationary period for a new employee is three months. During this time, the company will have time to understand whether you will be useful to it and whether your skills and knowledge meet their expectations. A new employee in the first months of work also evaluates the company - how much it meets his expectations and how comfortable it is to work in it. But the employee needs more time to evaluate - according to the statistics of our agency’s recruiters, the employee leaves the company after six months of work, if something went wrong in the new location.
The reasons may be different: relations with the leader have not developed, the team is not satisfied, etc. To avoid disappointment from a new place after a long search for vacancies, interviews and painful waiting for a decision from companies, you need to evaluate the offers and make the right choice for the employer. After so much time has been spent searching for a new job, it’s important not to spoil everything at the selection stage. In the article, we have collected tips to help you with this.

Select criteria for company valuation

So, the job offer is in your hands. So the company has already passed your initial selection and now is the time to think about the rest of the requirements for future work. In the general case, it is difficult to give advice on choosing criteria, because each one will have their own. Over the past year, I changed jobs twice and I have something to tell about my mistakes. I will not name the companies, let it be startup A and large company B.

Before moving to start-up And I worked for a long time in an office near my home, the journey in the morning and evening took no more than half an hour by public transport. The office of company A was located on the other side of Moscow and the journey to it took exactly an hour if you took the metro and bus. After a few weeks, I realized that regular and long metro rides are too tiring for me. After the transfer to company B, the road to the office began to take the same hour, but now it became possible to combine the MCC and the bicycle, and this is much more comfortable for me. Simulate your trip to the new office and try to understand how it will be more optimal and more comfortable to get to you, because one or two interview trips will not give you a full understanding.

For all the time I have accumulated many years of experience in the field of software development and testing. During the interview with the leaders of startup A, I had a positive impression about engineering and I did not ask questions about the development processes and tools. And in vain. Because the level of development was low and had to work hard to bring it to the level accepted in large companies. There are no unnecessary questions at the interview. Better to ask than to be disappointed in your assumptions later.

We had an agreement with the leaders of company A - in the future I will head the testing department, but I will work as an engineer for the duration of the trial period. Accepting a job offer, I knew that another employee who also had ambitions would come to the future testing department a few days earlier. As a result, instead of constructive work, there was competition between the two employees, which only harmed the work. With a successful outcome of the interview, it will not be out of place to ask you to introduce you to your future colleagues and arrange a meeting with your future leader if he was not present at the interview.

Company A grew rapidly and became crowded in the office. Therefore, a desktop was set for me instead of a guest sofa near the entrance to the office. Every day I involuntarily saw who and when comes to the office in the morning and leaves home in the evening. Even headphones with music did not help to focus on work. Ask the future leader to give you a tour of the office and show your workplace.

During my career, I changed six companies and I have formed my list of criteria for the employer:

- a strong team of engineers, working with whom I can learn and grow professionally
- an interesting project or product
- high standards of software quality adopted by the company
- if a star engineer works for the company, then for me this will be an additional argument for choosing a company. For example, Alexei Kuznetsov worked for Parallels, one of the authors of the TCP / IP stack in the Linux kernel
- health insurance
- social package
- time to travel

You will have your own list of criteria, but you can take mine as a basis.

Find reliable sources of information

When hiring a new employee, recruiters use every opportunity to learn more about the applicant before making an offer to him. The monitoring of accounts on social networks and the search for common acquaintances of the recruiter and the applicant or former colleagues of the applicant are also used in order to get an opinion about the person from the outside and increase the chances of a successful hiring. And what are you worse? This is the market and not only the company chooses you, but you are the company. Therefore, do not hesitate to inquire about the company, about the future leader and the project in which you have to work. How to do it - read on.

Perhaps the most unbiased source of information may be your former colleagues and friends who have already worked in this company. They don’t make sense to hide something from you and they will tell you how the company looks from the inside. Details are revealed that you will never learn about in an interview.



If you haven’t made such friends, you can contact Spice IT Agency for a free consultation. Agency recruiters will help find such people and share their contacts.

The network has specialized sites, chats and forums where company employees share their feedback about the employer. For specialists in the field of software testing, for example, this is the QABadCompany chat in Telegram. Interesting reviews about IT companies are left on the Ukrainian portal of software developers developers.org.ua. But there, unfortunately, mainly information about Ukrainian companies. The popular Glassdoor resource will help with reviews if the company is international.

Open data of the Federal Tax Service will help to indirectly get an idea of ​​the state of the company. According to the law, each company is obliged to publish data on income and expenses once a year. And if you want to work in a startup, it will be wise to find out if the company has self-sufficiency. If there is no profitability, then come up with plan B in case investors run out of money. And from June 1, 2018, information about the average number of employees will be open in accordance with Federal Law No. 134-ФЗ “On Amendments to Article 102 of Part One of the Tax Code of the Russian Federation”. Comparing information on the number of employees over the past few years, we can understand whether there have been massive reductions over the past year.

It is not worth relying heavily on information about the company in media articles - there can be either custom articles or articles from employees of the PR department of the company itself. Feedback from even strangers on social networks will be more true.

Personal experience

We asked the guys who found work with the help of our recruiters to answer questions about evaluating companies prior to employment. Anton Martynov works as a Full Stack developer at Market Music, and Vladimir Pavlovsky is a senior software developer at the National Credit Bureau.


Anton Martynov , .Net developer. I was looking for remote work on the MS SQL, ASP.NET and Angular2 technology stack. He had three offers on hand when he met Market Music. Successfully went through all stages of the interview in this company, received an offer and decided to work with them.


Vladimir Pavlovsky, software developer and enthusiastic mathematician. I was looking for a job where I could combine commercial development with scientific work. In addition, there was a desire to work with open source code and at least part of the time to work remotely. Fifty interviews took place during the year, and negotiations were continued in only three companies. The final choice fell on the National Credit Bureau.

What influenced your choice in favor of a company in the decision-making process?

Anton : I made a decision after the interview. I liked the friendly attitude, professional approach to development, the use of modern tools. There were no requirements for non-standard work schedules (as sometimes happens with Western customers), the development of non-core or outdated technologies and special knowledge (such as bank credit schemes, trading platforms, etc.).

Vladimir: First of all, my decision was influenced by the positive reaction of my future colleagues to my desire to devote a significant part of my working time to mathematical modeling. Secondly, the organization works closely with the HSE - two colleagues work as part-time teachers there, and this positively affects the atmosphere in the team as a whole. Thirdly, I managed to agree on a flexible seven-hour working day and a good compensation.

What were these sources of information?

Anton : At first I searched in open sources: the official site, articles about the company, mentions in social networks, the history of the search for employees and other general information.
Then he formed on the basis of this preliminary questions that he asked the recruiter. Finally, he asked all questions about the company at the interview.

Vladimir : Googled news about the company, googled individual employees, wrote to the predecessor.

Did you have disappointments in a new place due to some things that you did not know before entering a new job?

Anton : There are no disappointments yet.

Vladimir : The initial agreements were on working on mathematical models using the economic subject area, but it turned out that the system required serious changes, which I am still working on. But here it was impossible to predict on the one hand, on the other hand, there was nothing fatal here either, in addition, one of the team members is strong in DevOps, which simplifies control over the system.
Remember

Let's summarize. How to act to make a decision:

Make a list of criteria and requirements for work that are important to you. Sort them by priority and make sure that the position in the new company meets all these criteria.
Gather the maximum amount of information about the company and the environment in which you have to work, using different sources proposed in the article.
If necessary, negotiate again with the recruiter or future manager to get the missing information or agree on the conditions.

Sergey Bronnikov ,
SpiceIT special correspondent