The task

I was contacted by customer who was interested to find developer for his project. Combination of required skills was quite rare: Actionscript 3 (Flex or Flash), PHP 5 (both on very high level) , both as OOP and some technical design skills. Also person should accept and enjoy work from home, has good communications skills and of cause know English well.

The process

There are many experienced PHP developers in Ukraine, not so many but some ActionScript developers, however to find person who knows both part of job well was not an easy at all. I and customer already started to develop ‘plan B’: find separate PHP and ActionScript developers.

However I have used all available ways and in around 2 weeks have found 3 candidates with enough formal skills. 1 candidate disappeared. 2 candidates passed tests goods and I assigned final interview between them and customer.

Both persons made good impressions to my client, he have thought some time and selected one.

The result

Client have got the developer he looked for, in his budget and advice from me regarding documents (contract) with him.

What are year 2007 trends ? Where are we go?

Recently I took part in the outsourcing industry conference. Beside other interesting things, I attended two speeches, dedicated to IT job market situation in year 2007 in Ukraine. Both reports were done by representatives of recruiting agencies, but the content differ quite significantly.

First lady, that represent IT department of big recruiting company working across former Soviet Union stated that salary growth was quite insignificant (in compare with previous years boom), she said 10%-20%. The idea of her report was that now, the other than salary factors become more and more important and quite often candidates prefer positions with lower salary but better other factors combination (like interesting project, carrier growth prospects, comfortable working conditions, etc). Also she stressed the such situation when current employer counter offer more and more often is accepted and candidate remains in the company where he/she already works. So in many cases the purpose of interviews for candidates is just re-evaluate his/her market price and make ground for negotiation with employer.

Second report, also from IT department head of quite big recruiting agency confirms the tendency of growing importance of non-salary factors, but at her point of view salary proceed to hike, having around 50% growth rate in 2007.

So where is the true? How big the growth was?

In my opinion the average tendency is closer to 1-st lady report, obviously salary continue to grow, but rarely so fast as 50% in year. Probably new players, that just entered the market and have to create the team fast have to offer higher than market salaries, but that is not the whole market. I would say that growth of salaries was around 20-30% in whole. Of cause for some positions it maybe higher, but not for all. I would conclude it from my own experience and taking in account available statistic.