It’s a well-known fact that finding reliable and qualified software engineers has become a tricky task in today’s modern world. Whether you want to establish a high-tech start-up or just launch an innovative software product, finding great talent is all that matters at the end of the day. Consequently, you’ll need to grow your talent from scratch, poach it, or engage a software services provider, like Auriga, that helps clients solve such issues. The abovementioned problem is global—whether in the U.S., Europe, or Asia, it cannot be completely ignored. So, how do outsourcing providers solve this recruiting task for themselves? In his latest interview, Auriga’s General Manager, Andrey Pronin, discusses the right recruiting processes, employee-development approaches, and labour-market trends.
Auriga is proud to be one of the best customer-rated service providers in the world. Providing such service requires engineers and managers that not only have the right technical skills but also possess the right attitude and culture. “Traditionally, we have preferred to take on more experienced employees—no matter whether they came to us from the labor pool or another company. No more than 10 percent of our engineers have less than a year’s experience. However, it is becoming increasingly difficult to recruit people who possess the necessary technical skills and who also match our corporate culture. So now, we are moving towards another model and looking for more junior staff with brief experience in other companies. In this case, we can provide them with necessary skills and instill our approach to challenge handling, client interaction, and similar matters.”
Besides the right attitude and culture, Auriga considers a sense of the development process as one of the most important skills in the modern R&D world. “The term ‘process’ is usually interpreted too narrowly, so I need to explain what I mean. Overall, we are talking about the ability to obtain new and relevant information quickly, learn new systems, understand unfamiliar architecture, and compare multiple platforms to choose the best project. Obviously, proficiency in these practices comes with time, but the basic foundation should be laid during the initial training.”
As the education system provides little help in teaching the students those essential skills, Auriga works on developing those qualities in ‘freshers’ through the internal training system. Graduates of technical universities go through “the initial training period, consisting of intensive courses focused on a specific engineering area, and working under the supervision of a formally assigned mentor, [this] takes about three months […] the result of these efforts is just a good, junior-level engineer who can already be used in real-life projects, but who still has a long way to go.”
In addition to the training courses offered by the company, Auriga also looks for English language proficiency, which helps its employees develop. “The knowledge of English is much better than it was seven to ten years ago. […] a basic level of English is obviously not enough unless a person intends to stay at the junior level for years.” As a part of its training program, Auriga “partially subsidizes the cost of training, with the remainder being paid by the employee to encourage motivation. When someone invests their own money—even a small amount—they treat the process more seriously.”
