What's the Difference Between Russian and Western Recruiting?

The Lucky Hunter team helps companies from all over the world find the best tech professionals. Several years of work on the international market have allowed us to spot the key differences between Western and Russian recruitment.

The results turned out to be impressive: recruiting in Russia to a large extent outstrips recruiting in the West! In what aspects exactly - read in our article.

Speed

You might be surprised, but the speed of recruitment in Russia and the CIS states is several times higher than in Europe and the USA. To fill a position in two or three weeks for a Western company is an almost impossible task. And it's not about us. The fact is that European companies often consider candidates' CVs and check test assignments for about two weeks.

In Russia, this limit ranges from two to five days. Most companies from Russia and the CIS countries understand that delay will lead to a rejected offer and a tough search, so they try to give quick feedback on the candidates.

Despite the slow recruiting processes, foreign companies are more attractive for Russian-speaking IT specialists. The reasons lie in salary in foreign currency, prestige, an international team.

Strong interest in European and American companies is especially crucial today: the coronavirus pandemic has become an excellent motivation for tech candidates to join the team of a foreign company. Work at a foreign company provides stability (financial, economic and political), and in the long term - an opportunity for relocation.

Conservatism

You may be even more surprised to know that some Western tech companies are not only slower in recruiting tech staff, but also lag behind in technology.

A lot of legacy, outdated technology stack and architecture - all this characterizes a large number of foreign IT companies (at least according to our experience).

While Russia has already been hiring trendy Golang developers, European companies are searching for "classics of the genre", for example, Java or Ruby on Rails developers.

Requirements for a candidate

Some people think that it's not so easy for an ordinary tech specialist from the CIS countries to find a job in the West. In fact, the requirements for candidates of foreign tech companies are often not as strict as in Russia.

We at Lucky Hunter have noted that our Senior-level Specialist is almost a Team Leader in the West, and a Russian-speaking Middle-level developer can be rated as a Senior-level specialist when applying to a European company.

Nevertheless, it should be noted that the terms Junior-Middle-Senior are hypothetical and don't have clear criteria. We've already talked about in one of our articles.

In addition, foreign IT companies have a much shorter list of requirements. Perhaps this is due to the fact that many Western IT companies aren't so technologically advanced (point 2) and, therefore, require not so deep knowledge from the candidate.

On the other hand, in some aspects, the conditions of employment in foreign companies are somewhat stricter. For example, a large number of European companies require a test assignment.

95% of IT specialists have a negative attitude to the test assignment, especially if they aren't paid for it. Therefore, many Russian IT companies abandoned this stage, which is not relevant to the Western ones.

Some words about the test assignment

We at Lucky Hunter are sure: the test assignment is an unnecessary rudiment in the recruiting stages:

Speed
Test assignment significantly slows down the recruiting processes.
Challenges
It reduces the company's chances of hiring a highly qualified specialist (such guys rarely agree to complete the test assignment).
It's uninformative
Test assignment doesn't always provide reliable information about the skills of a specialist. Then why implement it?

And, of course, don't forget about the language: in order to get a job in Europe or the USA, you need to know a foreign language, most often English, but we suppose you already know that.

To sum up

We've been thinking about a revolution in the world of Western IT recruitment for a long time :) We hope that our goal will come true because six months ago we even opened an office in London.