“Working with Swedes” – Humeo’s RPO Recruiters Lidia & Pati at LeoVegas
June 3, 2022
Setting Up an Offshore Software Development Team: Is Poland a Good Location for IT Outsourcing?
September 15, 2022
A step-by-step guide
Once you decide to recruit software developers in Poland, there are several questions you need to answer. Where can you find the best tech professionals? What criteria should you apply to choose the best recruiters for your needs? What recruitment model should you choose?
In this guide, we will address all these questions and more. We will walk you through all the steps you should take to recruit the right IT specialists for the right roles in an IT hub, a software development center, or an offshore or nearshore IT team. We will give you plenty of useful tips to help you improve your hiring process if you want to recruit yourself and an overview of pricing models if you prefer partnering with an IT recruitment agency in Poland.
Hiring in-house recruiters in Poland
Finding and hiring tech recruiters: the who, where & how
Key facts & tips for hiring tech recruiters in Poland
1. Demand for IT recruiters in Poland is now almost as high as demand for IT specialists. We can tell you from experience that Humeo’s recruiters receive up to several dozen job offers every month.
2. If you are looking for experienced recruiters, here are a few tips to help you up your recruitment game:
- Create an authentic employer brand. Be active on social media, tell the stories of your employees, post updates on team-building events and activities, and describe the projects you are working on and your response to ongoing market challenges.
- Explore the potential of the private LinkedIn accounts of your employees and leaders (many professionals change jobs because of their managers).
- When promoting job listings, you should use not only job boards but also groups on Facebook and paid social media advertising.
- In the job listings you post, specify the scope of knowledge you expect the recruiter to have (the level of tech training), the team members that the recruiter will work with closely (team leaders, project managers, or the CEO), and the support you provide.
- During the recruitment process, clearly present all of its stages. Let the candidates know you are an expert, listen carefully to their needs, and make them feel that you can meet those needs. In addition, you can create an opportunity for the candidates to get to know your team.
3. Hiring a highly-skilled tech recruiter in Poland is not easy, which is why tech companies often choose to outsource IT recruitment to tech recruitment agencies in Poland. This will save you time and, in the long run, also money. Above all, however, you will gain a reliable recruitment and business partner that provides a stable, trustworthy, and comprehensive solution for companies that want to enter the Polish market.
Magnus Gagnelid
site coordinator at LeoVegas Group, one of Humeo’s clients
RPO from Humeo turned out to be the perfect solution for us. When we decided to open an IT hub in Poland, we knew that hiring developers would be the biggest challenge. RPO services allowed us to start quickly and save a lot of time on searching for recruiters. The cooperation goes very well and on top of superb recruitment services, we also get flexibility, expertise & market insights that Humeo acquired in their many projects.
Did you know?
Humeo’s RPO was used by one of our clients, Sweden’s LeoVegas Group. Humeo’s recruiters needed just six months to set up a software development team of 14 Java Developers, a QA Engineer, a Team Leader, and an HR Manager. In addition, we helped our client choose a location for the office of the newly-opened branch in Poland, work out a strategy for recruiting candidates in Poland, and in the long run, also for onboarding new employees.
Read our case study: Creating an IT Hub for Sweden’s LeoVegas Group to learn more about Humeo’s RPO solution (a tech recruiter handling recruitment processes only for your company) and its benefits for your business.
I have an in-house recruitment team. How do I recruit and hire IT specialists in Poland?
Job boards, employer branding & recruitment tools
If you have an in-house recruitment team that you can use to recruit IT specialists for a new development or tech team in Poland, here is a list of tips and resources you can use.
1. Employer branding & recruitment strategy
How you tell your company’s story matters. Phrases like “we are a fast-growing company” and “you will be joining a young and vibrant team” will only make the Polish tech professionals smile and, let’s be frank, roll their eyes, perhaps with a sigh of resignation. Job advertisements riddled with clichés are a big no-no.
Instead, you should focus on what makes your company authentic. We know it’s hard to put all these things into a job advertisement. For this reason, you should leverage your social media presence to describe your company and its activity. You should also raise this issue during job interviews. Remember to cite specific sources that candidates can later check on your website. This will definitely bring the candidates one step closer to deciding that they want to join your company.
So let’s dig a little deeper into how you can achieve this goal.
- Present your company’s story using employee stories. Create a place for your employees to tell their stories and explore their potential. For example, you can offer them training on building a personal brand using LinkedIn or engage them in marketing and EB campaigns. You can post interviews with members of your software development team and a series of articles describing their work or even organize a webinar with your developers as experts. Needless to say, you should not forget to introduce newcomers. After all, they’ve decided to join your company, so they probably had good reasons to do so – this is yet another good advertisement for your brand.
- During the pandemic, stability was especially important to employees. Prolonged periods of remote work have already created a range of problems, and we are likely to face new challenges too. You can use your blog and social media to share information about how your organization is addressing such issues. This will help you convince candidates that you know what you are doing, and that your company is stable and secure, but you are also thinking about the future and growth.
- Information about your clients can be very important to candidates. Who are your clients? Who uses your services? Who buys your products? Answering these questions not only shows that your business is profitable and financially stable, but also affects the prestige of your organization.
- IT professionals in Poland also want to work on interesting projects, so you can make your offer more attractive by including such information.
Here are a few EB tips along with examples of such actions taken by some of Humeo’s clients:
- Provide updates on what is happening in your company: LeoVegas Hackathon – behind the scenes
- Be transparent: Investor Relations – quartetly report by LeoVegas Group
- Tell employee stories: AWS superstars from Nordcloud, an IBM Company
- Share information about the awards and distinctions received by your company: Azure Modern Infra Modernisation Award 2022 for Nordcloud, an IBM Company
- Let job seekers know how your company responds to ongoing market challenges (here in the form of a report with guidelines on possible actions in the post-pandemic world): Akamai’s Report
- Present new employees: Meeting for new-joiners in Akamai
In addition to good employer branding, you should not forget about a good recruitment strategy adjusted to the realities of the IT market in Poland.
Here are only some of the aspects you should consider in this context:
- forms of communication with Polish IT specialists;
- recruitment tools;
- recruitment using in-house recruiters or an IT recruitment company familiar with the local market, or a combination of these two approaches;
- the content of job listings and the careers section on your website, and their adaptation to the situation in Poland;
- the time you need to spend on marketing and employer branding (including videos and multimedia materials) versus deep sourcing and good approaches;
- the ways to describe your business to potential candidates and the necessary elements of such communication;
- the stages of the recruitment process and its adjustment to the realities of the Polish market (shorter vs. longer stages).
It will definitely not be easy to decide on all these issues, especially if you are not familiar with the Polish job market. Many companies therefore decide to use Polish consultancy firms to find out more about these aspects of recruitment. Those who expect even more comprehensive solutions choose to partner with local IT recruitment agencies.
When opening a new IT hub in Poland, LeoVegas Group decided to use Humeo’s services, more specifically the RPO solution. Humeo’s tech recruiters Lidia and Patrycja supported (and still support) LeoVegas in all of its recruitment processes. They drew on their experience and knowledge of the Polish IT market to help our client choose office space in Warsaw, designed the recruitment process, and remained actively involved in the onboarding of new hires. In this post on Humeo’s blog, Lidia and Patrycja describe this project in their own words: “Working with Swedes” – Humeo’s RPO Recruiters Lidia & Pati at LeoVegas:
2. Job boards
Once you’ve decided on the form of communication, the presentation of your company, the recruitment process, and the content of job advertisements, you should consider the places where you can post them. We suggest five job boards, which we believe are the most popular websites with IT job offers.
- Just Join IT,
- No Fluff Jobs,
- Bulldogjob.pl,
- IT.Pracuj.pl,
- Inhire.io.
To find top software developers, you can also use more advanced sourcing methods and visit the websites that Polish programmers usually use to find answers to questions related to their daily work:
- Stack Overflow (an international platform used by developers to share their knowledge and by business clients to post jobs and other advertisements);
- 4programmers (a Polish knowledge-sharing platform that also features microblogs, job advertisements, and resources for programmers);
- Polish groups for IT professionals on Facebook:
- Programiści Polska (Developers Poland)
- Women in Technology Poland
- Gamedev.js – a group for developers of HTML 5 games
- Groups for front-end developers: JS News, JS News: after hours, JS News: Jobs, React Polska (React Poland), Angular Polska (Angular Poland), Vue.js Polska (Vue.js Poland), Vue.js Jobs Poland, HTML/CSS/Javascript – Front-end PL
- Programista Na Swoim (a group for developers who work or want to work under B2B contracts)
- Praca: programowanie, branża IT: Junior (job offers for junior developers)
- Praca w branży IT: Mid, Senior (job offers for mid/senior developers)
- Praca dla programistów i programistek powyżej 20000 zł, 30000 zł i 40000 zł (job offers for programmers > 20,000, 30,000, 40,000 zlotys);
- Wykop.pl and its #programowanie (a Polish news platform with a message board frequently visited by Polish developers).
For more sourcing tips, read Humeo’s blog post “How to find good software developers in Poland.”
3. Recruitment tools
Using specialist recruitment tools for all recruitment processes is also a good idea that will save you a lot of time and consequently money. In addition, your recruitment process will be more effective and more enjoyable for candidates.
Here are some of the tools that we believe are worth exploring:
- free communication tools: Google Hangouts, Zoom, Whereby;
- free recruitment tools: Whimsical, Miro, Explain Everything;
- free Live Coding tools: Teletype for Atom, Code Sandbox, Codeanywhere;
- spelling and grammar check apps: Hemingway App, Grammarly, Language Tool, Textio;
- sourcing and ATS: Elevato, GreenHouse, Lever, Recruitee, Smartrecruiters, TRAFFIT, JobAdder;
- sourcing automation tools: AmazingHiring, hireEZ (formerly known as Hiretual);
- e-mail automation tools: Gmelius, Reply, Hunter;
- automated scheduling tools: Calendly, Appoint.ly, Google Calendar.
Ready-to-use solutions from IT recruitment agencies
Recruitment & pricing models
If you feel overwhelmed by all these issues related to hiring tech recruiters, you don’t have the time to recruit software developers for an offshore tech team, or you simply want to have a reliable business partner that will guide you step by step through the creation of a software development center, you can explore the solution we propose in this e-book with a comparison of recruitment services.
Here, we would like to remind you that if you decide to recruit IT specialists in Poland, you will be typically choosing between an external IT recruitment agency (the success fee model) and an IT recruiter dedicated to your business (either an in-house recruiter or a freelancer). But you can also choose Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO), a solution that combines these two options: you partner with a recruitment agency and receive a highly-skilled tech recruiter who handles only your recruitment processes.
So if you don’t have the time or resources to hire full-time tech recruiters who know the Polish IT market, the best solution for you will be to engage a recruitment agency in Poland. IT recruitment agencies typically use two pricing models: the success fee and RPO. We describe them in this e-book:
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