How much does it cost to hire an IT specialist in Poland? What trends can we expect to see in 2023 (like IT salaries in Poland)? What do figures for Q4 2022 reveal? How much do you need to set aside for your recruitment budget? In this article, we’ll try to answer these questions with facts, figures, and free tips from Humeo’s recruiters.

Planning a recruitment budget is part math, part experience. So to get the hard data, we reached for Inhire’s quarterly report, a publication known to everyone in the tech recruitment sector. In this post, we combine statistics and market insights from Humeo’s recruiters based on the feedback they receive from the IT professionals they contact on a daily basis. We also share with you free resources packed with useful tips, which result from the experience we’ve gained over the years of working with various clients. We hope they will help you plan your recruitment budget for 2023.

Table of contents:

1. IT salaries in Poland – Q4 2022
2. Insights from Humeo’s recruiters – the Polish IT market in 2022/2023
3. Free resources from Humeo: a webinar video and a cheat sheet to download

Pay levels in the IT sector in Poland – Q4 2022 – average high-end salaries

Let’s start off by analyzing the salaries offered to IT professionals in Poland. Inhire.io’s report lists average monthly high-end salaries based on jobs posted on the most popular job search websites for IT professionals in Poland (pracuj.pl, inhire.io, nofluffjobs.com, and justjoin.it). 

Below are the results broken down by three categories.

By city:

By seniority:

By technology:

For more information, including rates depending on specialization and the best paid keywords,  download Inhire’s report IT Market Snapshop 2022.

Insights from Humeo’s recruiters on the salaries in the Polish IT sector and job market trends in 2023

Such reports as Inhire’s Market Snapshot are great sources of knowledge. But to estimate how much it will cost to hire IT professionals in 2023, we should also look at facts and figures through the prism of the actual experience gained by those who talk to software developers on a daily basis. Humeo’s recruiters comment on the IT market in Poland in 2022/2023, salary ranges, and vacancies. They also say what you can do if the salary range in your job posting does not match the expectations of job seekers. 

Humeo’s experts admit that IT professionals continue to have high salary expectations, but they also share their observations on how employers can address these challenges during recruitment.

How much does it cost to hire an IT specialist in Poland? What rates should employers offer in 2023? The answer is, it depends. A candidate may write to me in a private message on LinkedIn that they’re interested in at least PLN 300 per hour under a B2B contract (for example, for the role of Senior DevOps Engineer). However, this doesn’t mean that they actually earn that much – they just know that these are the rates offered by some employers. So I prefer to openly state the salary range in the first message. If the candidate doesn’t like it, they might be persuaded by other benefits (a large budget for training, more paid vacation days, true flexibility at work, and so on). But if the difference between the financial expectations of job seekers and the salary ranges proposed by the employer is too great, and this problem keeps repeating itself, I believe it’s worth calling the Hiring Manager’s attention to this fact.

As for specific rates, based on data from six months ago for the Polish market (I now recruit IT professionals for foreign markets), here are the hourly rates proposed by software engineers who applied for jobs posted on job search websites:

– Product Owner –  about PLN 120, 
– Software Engineer (approx. 3 years of experience) – PLN 150,
– DevOps Engineer (approx. 3 years of experience) – PLN 160,
– QA Engineer (approx. 3 years of experience) – PLN 95, 
– QA Engineer (approx. 5 years of experience) – PLN 150.

We should remember, though, that there are dramatic differences in the rates proposed by the candidates who apply for jobs and the rates expected by those approached by a sourcer or a recruiter.

Salaries in the IT sector are high, so you need to focus on the candidates who are interested in something more than money, for example the opportunity to work on your projects, in your sector, or for your business organization for reasons related to your brand/prestige or the job stability you offer (the length of the project matters, but so does the fact that the employer is a product company). 

But it’s also important to have the right approach. Recruiters shouldn’t approach a role with negative preconceptions or the belief that it can’t be closed. We are never “others,” and no candidate is “the majority.” 😉 

As for the technical aspects, you can increase your candidate pipeline by prioritizing specific skills for specific roles. It’s important to decide which skills the candidates need to do their job, and which can be learned. Importantly, if this is going to work, you should talk not about small things but about actual added value. For example, if you need a Cloud DevOps Engineer, the candidate must be able to set up a large infrastructure (know k8s), but you can teach them cloud aspects. 

Finally, I can share with you one tip to improve your recruitment. Remember to choose the right name for the job you’re posting on job boards. Don’t make it sound too fancy, because such an ad will only attract very experienced and expensive candidates and discourage other valuable specialists from applying.

As for Inhire’s report, I’d definitely agree that there are fewer jobs for junior and mid-level specialists. Many companies have halted recruitment for these positions, citing the urgent need to hire highly-skilled experts and the (hopefully temporary) lack of capacity to mentor less experienced developers. Consequently, we can observe growing expectations on the part of senior engineers, who are in high demand and know that their work is very important for employers. 

However, I don’t think employers should reject less experienced candidates. Such an approach is risky – after all, recruitment for senior positions usually takes more time. My advice is, don’t fall into the trap of hiring only senior developers, and remember that you should measure the value of employees not only by the knowledge they already have, but also by their readiness and potential to learn.

Free tips to help you plan your recruitment budget for 2023

Both statistics and the experience of Humeo’s recruiters show that the market keeps evolving, and this fact may pose a huge challenge to some employers. So it’s natural that you may be asking yourself a number of questions:

You may have more questions, and we don’t want to leave you without support. We use the experience we’ve gained over the years of recruiting IT professionals and helping our clients optimize their recruitment budgets to provide professional consultancy services and share our knowledge. For example, we recently organized a webinar with tips on how to plan a recruitment budget in 2023 (video in Polish).

Watch the video to get more recruitment tips.

If you want to know which categories of expenses you should include in your recruitment budget for 2023, feel free to schedule a meeting with Mateusz. He will help you decide what the market challenges described in this article mean for you and how you should respond to them 🙂

Contact form

If you prefer contact us by e-mail, use the contact form below.

Fill out the form below if you would like to get an individual offer and the pricing.