Current Human Resources issues in the product development
The product development sector is extremely dynamic by nature. When we factor in the increasingly VUCA state of the world and the current global pandemic, we have a perfect storm of unpredictable change. While the whole world is facing lockdowns and other restrictions, software development companies and other sector players are struggling with their own set of challenges. Many of them are in the complex HR realm. Read on to learn about the current human resource issues in product development and how Boldare is tackling them.
Table of contents
The current state of employment in product development
The software development sector globally is facing increased demand for its services. Added to this, the sector is experiencing high levels of employee turnover. The knock-on effect is that tech companies are in an almost constant state of recruitment – either due to expansion in response to demand or filling the gaps as people move on.
In Poland, one of the biggest European talent pools, the number of job offers in the IT sector increased by 55% in Q3 2021, compared to the previous year. The American “Great Resignation” is also affecting the tech scene, where more and more engineers are seeking new workplaces, increasing employee churn rates.
It’s worth, once again, emphasizing that the current issues in human resource management are global.
As IT companies are increasingly focused on recruitment, they naturally need people who can manage such exercises. No surprise then that the number of job offers in the HR sector also increased in Q3 2021 (by 66%).
This makes for a twofold challenge facing IT companies: a shortage of experienced software developers and product designers, and… a shortage of the very people tasked with finding them, mainly recruiters and the HR experts that specialize in taking care of employees once they’re hired.
For most companies with digital products in their portfolios, this means double trouble. Products and their updates are launched later than expected, and it becomes more difficult to acquire new customers.
At Boldare, we can confirm the truth of these challenges. We are constantly in the process of recruiting digital product roles: developers, designers, quality assurance specialists, and scrum masters. We regularly analyze current job market trends, adapting our recruitment and selection processes and activities to three sets of constantly changing needs: those of the job seekers, as well as those of our clients and our company. In our strategies, we take into account the employee life cycle, employee motivation factors, and our need as an employer to maintain high levels of employee engagement.
Current human resource issues in product development - a butterfly effect
All of the challenges regarding the issues in recruitment and employee turnover of software developers are influencing almost every single industry. The reason is simply this: software runs the world and each sector relies on software in various ways. It’s a butterfly effect. Problems that an American SaaS company has with recruiting developers will influence their customers all over the world in the form of fewer updates to their software, more unresolved bugs, etc.
What are the most painful Human Resources-related issues?
- A lack of senior developers on the market.
- Skyrocketing salary and employment costs.
- A migration of experienced developers from ‘lower-cost service’ markets (e.g. in Central and Eastern European countries, such as Poland) to higher-paying markets in the West.
- Employees are more demanding, seeking more holistic rewards (i.e. they’re interested in not just salary, but also the benefits on offer, the company culture, and the type of clients they will be working with).
- Less experienced, junior employees cannot find mentors or employers who will support them in developing their skills.
- Developers and product designers are constantly looking for interesting projects that enable them to develop their skills and are prepared to change employers to find them.
Now, let’s take a look at how Boldare is tackling these issues.
HR & Recruitment strategy #1 – maintain a healthy mix between senior, mid-level and junior developers
Right now, there are hardly any senior and mid-level developers left on the market, so we are recruiting mostly juniors. The people who apply to us have little experience but they want to learn new and interesting skills quickly. They’re especially interested in working with the latest technologies, like those utilized by Boldare.
Many junior candidates have no university IT degree – they are either self-educated, have reskilled, or are bootcamp-trained. Such candidates, usually with one to three years’ experience, know plenty and have considerable skills. But, they lack the academic knowledge that would help them find their way around the software development process quicker and more smoothly.
At Boldare, we have tools and processes that support swift onboarding, upskilling, and learning (e.g. our senior mentorship programs, technology chapters, and frontend/backend knowledge exchange). A huge factor is our use of the agile scrum framework. Scrum teams are interdisciplinary which means constant learning opportunities with new hires working alongside colleagues with broad and varied skill sets.
In recent months and years, we have noticed the phenomenon of Polish developers leaving to work with Western IT companies. The flip side to this is that when they return from Silicon Valley (and they do, quite often!), while they may have higher financial expectations, they bring valuable insights and a range of advanced technical and business skills that can enrich the team. We are happy to invest in employing such people because they not only deliver high-quality work and interesting solutions, but they also serve as mentors to their less-experienced colleagues and support their development.
At Boldare, we monitor the levels of seniority in our organization, maintaining a healthy distribution of talent, and a combination of know-how, efficient delivery, and continuous learning. We also benefit from our holacratic organizational structure and lack of project managers which encourages responsibility and decision-making in all roles.
HR & Recruitment strategy #2 – internship programs as a way of expanding the talent pool
When talent is scarce, the answer is to grow your own. For us, internship programs are a great talent pool, especially now that it’s so hard to find experienced specialists on the market. We train our interns in both hard and soft skills, including best practice dealings with colleagues and customers. Each of our interns has a mentor, takes part in in-house initiatives, and ultimately works with our experienced specialists on a commercial project.
We pay attention to interns’ personal development – they receive regular feedback from their teams and mentors, with a view to working independently as quickly as possible (but never before they are ready!)
HR & Recruitment strategy #3 – a unique process of recruitment and onboarding for developers and designers
Our experienced team of recruiters cooperates closely with each hiring team or department, tailoring their process and recruitment strategy to the actual needs of the specific vacancy. We place a lot of emphasis on the business context of the role, and each stage of recruitment verifies the key competencies and behaviors we are looking for in candidates. We attach great significance to cultural fit – candidates who share our progressive values and attitude to the work are more likely to work with us long-term and to realize their full potential.
For product roles, the recruitment process has just two stages:
- a short phone interview between the recruiter and candidate; and
- a technical interview with the recruiter and a specialist, either from the hiring team or department or someone in the same role.
The phone screening allows verification of the candidate’s cultural fit and motivation to work in the selected role. The technical conversation includes the candidate’s business competencies, but its core focus is to check technical skills and knowledge.
In the past, we have found that recruitment assignments prolong the process unnecessarily and result in good potential candidates dropping out of the process.
We focus on using behavioral interviews, whose effectiveness in predicting future behavior in the workplace is 55% (that’s 45% higher than traditional job interviews), according to a US study by Quintessential Careers).
When recruiting designers, a Boldare product designer also reviews each candidate’s project portfolio, prior to the interview.
(Also, rest assured that we monitor and regularly review all elements of our recruitment process, tweaking and updating as necessary.)
Onboarding
For successful candidates, the onboarding process begins before they officially join Boldare. New employees are invited to our Slack pre-boarding channel, several days prior to starting, enabling them to ask questions and learn more about the company or their first project before their first day.
Our onboarding process lasts three months, on average, familiarizing new starters with the organization and holacracy, as well as their specific roles and projects. During this time, new employees receive three rounds of formal feedback about their progress, including three self-evaluation exercises.
Our key onboarding metrics are:
- level of integration in the company,
- understanding new concepts,
- general attitude toward the organization and holacracy.
The third round of feedback takes place at the end of the onboarding process and can result in a change of seniority level and remuneration.
HR & Recruitment strategy #4 – Recruiting to specific stages of Full Cycle Product Development (FCPD)
We recruit experts to particular stages of Full Cycle Product Development (broadly speaking, one of four team types: prototyping, minimum viable products, product-market fit, and product scaling) each of which requires a different approach and a different employee profile.
As part of our recruitment process, we select interview questions that identify an applicant’s best fit within the FCPD framework.
Matching employees to FCPD stages has proven to be the most effective approach as far as resource and energy optimization is concerned. Boldare employees focus on the stage that they feel most comfortable with and in which they are most productive.
We have noticed that applicants often mention the possibility of working on a particular stage as an important incentive for working at Boldare.
HR & Recruitment strategy #5 – Employee turnover and retention through motivation, engagement, and positive employee experience:
Employee turnover rates in the IT sector are very high currently. The popularity and easy availability of job boards, the number of job ads published, the reach of LinkedIn, and the increase in talent pipelines that can reach even passive (but skilled) candidates all contribute to high turnover.
At Boldare, we try to be alert to fluctuations in work motivation and to respond to both employees’ needs and their willingness to work and grow. Within the limits of our operations, our people can switch projects, take a longer vacation to regain perspective, fulfill their ambitions by means of in-company activities (e.g. by writing articles like I do!) or take on mixed roles. We also do our best to take special care of every employee’s work-life balance and integration.
As for location, we work in hybrid mode. Some of us work from one of the offices on a regular basis; some from time to time; others work almost completely remotely. We have relocation and integration budgets to support this hybrid strategy. As a general principle, we try to have whole teams working together in one location if possible; at the least, our people meet regularly for team-building.
HR and recruitment strategies that save our partners money
Recruiting and retaining skilled and enthusiastic people to work at Boldare is only part of the equation. Naturally, having the best possible workforce should translate not only into a great working environment, but also into tangible benefits for our clients and partners.
Our clients are guaranteed to benefit from the high-level technical and business qualifications of our project teams. For those looking for an alternative to maintaining their own in-house development teams, they are freed from the costs of employee recruitment and turnover.
Why is this so important? Well, recruitment and turnover costs are not low!
Recruitment costs include either the salary and maintenance costs of an in-house recruiter (or team of recruiters), or the fees of an external recruitment agency (these days, the average success fee of a recruitment company is 17-19% of the monthly gross wage of a recruited developer).
Turnover costs are also significant. According to independent studies by Sedlak & Sedlak and PwC, the total cost of replacing an existing employee with a new hire can be the equivalent of their annual remuneration.
Managing the current human resource issues in the product development sector
The current human resources challenges we are facing in the IT sector are not new. They are, however, intensified and magnified by the world in which we are operating. High demands in the sector have led to higher staff turnover and a shortage of new candidates. At Boldare, we’ve found that what works is a combined strategy that emphasizes the candidate and new starter experiences, offers individual support, and all with a clear focus on cultural and attitudinal fit.
Share this article:
