Cluj IT Market. The guide for newcomers 2. How can you attract the best talent?

The next sentence is crucial, so read it twice.

The Cluj IT market is a passive one.

We cannot stress enough how relevant this piece of information is when you start building your strategy. Now let us explain why.

In the last years, Cluj has seen an immense increase in the IT sector, with companies choosing this city for their businesses, which led to a plethora of open roles. In the beginning, this was impressive. Soon after, an imbalance in the supply-demand chain began to take shape, as in every IT cluster in the world.

What you can expect from the market:

• 80% of the professionals on the market don't have any thought of leaving their job
• only 20% of actively looking professionals and our statistics show that of this 20%, less than one-quarter of applicants are qualified for the job they are applying to

If you find yourself frowning at this point, you can relax, we have been successfully doing IT recruitment for the past seven years, and you can have great results if you are careful with the following aspects. The degree of importance for each correlates with the candidate’s level of experience, but we will get into that soon enough.

When asked about their motivations to leave their current job, candidates pick at least two of these:

After reaching at least a middle level of seniority, the majority of the candidates will be more likely to change their job if:

• They can work with modern technologies;
• Have prospects of more contribution to the team, besides development;
• Be part of a friendly team, where they can create bonds;
• Work on an exciting project with the least maintenance tasks possible;
• Financial gain;

If your focus is on highly skilled senior developers, the priorities change, and you are most likely to attract the talent you need if:

• Your project poses a technical challenge, effectively contributes to solving problems, or is using complex logic;
• The responsibilities of the job involve elements as mentoring, coaching, technical leadership, architecture/design of an application, knowledge sharing sessions;
• You use modern technologies - although, have in mind that it is common to find senior developers who have a different approach to programming and believe that good developers can quickly learn a new framework or technology;
• The team’s composition has a high ratio of senior developers;

A frequent phenomenon that we see is that senior developers are not interested only in raising their salary because many of them already have a high level of compensation. Interestingly, senior-level candidates can also accept hiring offers a bit lower than their current earnings if the project or their responsibilities are challenging enough.

Stay tuned, next week we will post Part III of the five-part series, about How much you will pay (for the developer and on taxes).