How to recruit a
Front-End Developer?
The Lucky Hunter case

In November 2018 an American grocery company which has recently opened an office in St. Petersburg turned to us, demanding to find four middle front-end developers in a month. Experience with React was the prerequisite. In truth, the task is not simple. We identified 5 major difficulties that we had to face.

To begin with, the position of the front-end developer is second in demand in the field of information technology. Let's have a look at the data collected from Indeed (a popular site for job search) for clarity.

Besides the fact that front-end developers are requisite for nearly every company, they are nowhere to be taken. Not long ago "Indeed" has conducted a study to identify the scarcest IT specialists. It turned out that the front-end developers were in the TOP 10 of the most difficult to fill positions.

If we search for front-end developer's job on the most popular in Russia job portal "Headhunter", we will see that there are 522 open vacancies in Saint-Petersburg. In Moscow - 1099, this is twice as large as in Saint-Petersburg. Throughout Russia, 2883 developers are required. In other words, Moscow and St. Petersburg account for more than 50% of vacancies of front-end developers. As previously noted, demand significantly exceeds supply. Let's not forget that we needed to find not one, but four hard-to-find regional specialists and fix them up with a job within a month.

The customer needed not only to find an IT specialist; he needed competent in React developer. The research article "Front-End tooling Trends for 2017", posted by Sitepoint, provides data on the demand for various libraries and frameworks. For front-end developers, the use of React turned out to be uncharacteristic. Only 37% of developers use this framework, and only 29% of them are satisfied with the framework. The researchers also indicated that only 0.1% of all websites were developed using React.

Consequently, we had a stop list of candidates, which complicated the search for specialists.

Difficult task means interesting task. We did not despair because there are no impossible tasks for us. First of all, we transferred the project to the category of "urgent". What's that supposed to mean? The fact is that when we face such problems and have very limited time frames, we use additional means to fill vacancies, including additional specialists.

It is not realistic for one person to find all possible candidates, including those who are not searching for a job, to interview specialists, to deal with candidate flow. Therefore, we have involved not one, as usual, but three professional IT recruiters.

Probably the most important step in solving the problem was feedback with the customer. Our client contributed to the promotion of the case as much as possible: he was always in touch, selected candidates in a prompt manner, sorted through the resume, and gave comments. This is really important. A special thanks for this to our client.

Despite the parallel search for candidates by internal HR managers, our recruiters have filled job vacancies. The reason lies in the knowledge of the specificity of IT specialists' selection. For the successful filling a job openng, we have processed 231 applications of candidates, 42 of whom we have personally interviewed. 25 CVs have been shown to our Customer, 16 of them our client has selected and subsequently interviewed. Offers were made to five job-seekers. Four candidates agreed.

Anyway, the statistics from the CRM system is the best demonstration of our results:

In order to fill four job openings for the position of a front-end developer, we needed:

• active search for candidates who were not actively looking for a new position;
• 3 experienced IT recruiters;
• 231 candidates;
• 40 interviews;
• well-coordinated work with the customer;
• a bit of perseverance.

No magic.