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How CTO Works for a Recruiter

A new employee in the company can cost as much as a new MacBook - from 100,000 rubles. The cost of an hour CTO (Chief Technology Officer), technical support and HR, which are involved in the search, screening resumes and interviews, add up to this amount. But this is not the biggest figure. The search can be delayed for months, you need to pay for publishing a vacancy on HeadHunter, and you have not yet taken into account the lost profit from the fact that there is no new employee, but the old ones are processing.



My name is Svetlana Petrovicheva, 10 years I have been working in IT recruiting. I talked with several CTOs about how they get hired, why they have to spend tens of hours on selecting developers, what they lose money on, where it hurts the most, and why one employee costs like a new MacBook or even more. If you are CTO, everything will be familiar to you, but you can see several options (or suggest in the comments) how to get out of the recruiting funnel. If you are a developer, you will find out what causes your CTO or techlide to suffer. Under the cut, we calculate in figures how much one developer costs, formulas for calculating potential losses, thoughts of company executives and startups about the problem of hiring for CTO and solutions.

The service station is a manager: he is responsible for the product and terms before the management, determines the strategy, makes key decisions on architecture and technologies (from the supply of technical lead), knocks out budgets and manages technical teams and managers.


A selection of CTO responsibilities from vacancies.

Recruiting is not CTO's primary responsibility. He can interview, approve candidates and dismiss, but the main job of selection should be done by HR. In the real world, a service station can be an engineer, architect, technical expert, developer and product manager. Why don't he also work as an HR or a recruiter?

Recruiters or HR search for a long time, offer non-core candidates, do not know how to sell a job and are silent as partisans about the projects that the candidate will have to work with. This leads to the fact that if CTO does not hire a candidate on its own, it loses money. If he hires on his own, he loses time and even more money. How does this happen.

Why does CTO get stuck in hiring


In normal hiring, when a team leader or team leader understands that the team is not doing their job, they tell CTO that they need people. CTO transfers the order to HR (recruiter), explains who is needed, for what tasks, voices the plug.

HR works further: it searches for candidates, communicates with them and eliminates them. The rest is invited for interviews, where he evaluates soft skills, and team leaders or technical students study technical knowledge and skills. CTO is connected at the last stage , when the candidate has passed all the selection rounds and watches how the developer fits into the team. But more often all is a little wrong.



Most part of timerecruiters spend on search. To speed up the process, the company trains recruiters in sourcing, building Boolean queries, and buys expensive aggregators, for example, AmazingHiring. But instead of speeding up, tools immerse the department in an even larger funnel of passive candidates, because there is little data on skills in the questionnaires and resumes of candidates on the sites, and there are no wishes for a future job. The recruiter does not know whether the candidate is ready to consider the proposal or not - these are passive candidates. All this slows down the search.



The recruiter sends all resumes immediately to CTO or techlida. View CV, select, invite - CTO spends many hours on all this to select one candidate.



Recruiting turns into hunting. When working with passive candidates, HR sends 25 letters in 8 hours, at best, and receives 1-2.



Hiring one candidate takes 40-50 hours , and vacancies are closed only 1-3 per month. While working with active candidates, positive answers are 60%, and the whole process takes about 2 hours.

HeadHunter and recruiters are ineffective


Often for the employer (CTO) other than HH.ru there is no alternative. But this channel is not IT-oriented - it is a massive resource with vacancies from the loader to the general director of the corporation.



HeadHunter is almost the only HR tool. But if it seems that HR is ineffective, then with recruiters it’s even worse.



The task of the agency is to get its commission. Most often they “vacuum” the resume, but they cannot evaluate them, massively “bomb” the candidates, cannot tell anything about the product, and send the resume to everyone. The funnel is large, but of terrible quality. This is a standard pain and a massive problem.



STO and the team can evaluate technical skills as experts. But if agencies cannot test soft skills, then this slows down the team even more. You have to spend a lot of time on interviews - this distracts from current tasks, but it is of little use. As a result, the project suffers, which means profit.

If CTO does not hire a candidate on his own, he loses time and money on a recruiter. If on his own, he loses time, and the company has money, because he is not engaged in his duties. This is problem.



MacBook for one developer


CTO and techlide are highly paid specialists. On HH.ru and Habr Careers, salaries vary (on average) from 100,000 to 350,000 rubles.



The price of an hour of work is about 2500 rubles.



The technical salary in the region of 250,000 rubles.



The price of an hour of technical support is slightly lower (sometimes the same, but it depends on the company).

Disclaimer Proposals of more than 300-350,000 are rare or associated with relocation. You can’t watch less offers - subjectively, a CTO-level specialist or technical engineer cannot work in less than 200,000. Therefore, we agree to consider spherical specialists in a vacuum in current forks.

In small companies, CTOs may lose “not much time” on hiring.



But the larger the scale, the deeper the CTO plunges into the funnel of hiring and the greater the cost.



Non-core work of CTO and technical maintenance, expenses for a recruiter with an average salary of 125,000, taxes, the price of a workplace, vacation pay, sick leave, bonuses, corporate parties add up to hundreds of thousands of rubles per employee.



But that is not all. In addition to the fact that engineers, developers, testers or DevOps engineers experience an increased load when there are not enough people, the company suffers losses simply because the employee is not on staff.

Count. Suppose company N earns 100 million rubles a year. Total employees 25. It turns out that one employee brings (conditionally) 2 million per year. Divide by 365 and get 10 800 rubles - revenue from one employee per day. 

Now multiply this amount by the number of days spent hiring, and calculate the potential loss from the absence of an employee. If the search is extended for a week, then the loss is 75,000, and if for the month - 302,000. But, as we have seen, the search can be extended for months.

Disclaimer: Of course, you need to take into account taxes, deductions, holidays and other parameters for the purity of the calculations, but I took the conditional numbers to illustrate the calculation method itself with an example. 

How can CTO stop working as a recruiter


Evaluation of other CTOs.



If you use a non-mainstream language like Scala or Ruby, then its community is small, everything is in sight. You can take feedback from other CTOs directly or through friends. In other languages ​​or directions, everything can be different.

Transfer responsibilities to an individual employee. Its functions, speed and efficiency will not differ from an ordinary recruiter, but the salary is much less.



In large companies, instead of HR or an office manager, the obligation to review the resume can be shifted to the developer. HR "sows" a vacancy on "work" resources and searches for suitable candidates, collects resumes, selects suitable ones and gives it to the developer. He is already studying skills, stack, experience in order to select candidates for interviews.

This is how work with resume is arranged in DODO IS, but this option also does not guarantee speed. There are dozens of resumes per candidate accepted (in article 78 to 1), each of which takes 10-40 minutes. If you take the minimum, it turns out about 10 hours. In this case, the costs will be slightly lower, because the developer's salary is usually lower than that of CTO.

Evaluation of soft skills. Facilitates the work of a technical interviewer - you don’t have to spend time interviewing on soft skills. It is the responsibility of the HR or recruiter, but, as we have already described, it is often not fulfilled.



Delegate code evaluation.A code evaluation service could save hours of interview time. But a problem arises - unfortunately, except for the developers of the company, no one can do this, because everyone has their own requirements. Therefore, only your people should evaluate the candidate code. GitHub doesn't always help either. A developer who writes an Open Source product and receives community approval will not necessarily be good at a commercial project.

Internship . Something similar is set up at DODO IS (again) -  test day. This is a full-time work in the office. A candidate can look at the code base, talk with developers, take a tour of the office, take part in a rally, see how the development works and test pizza. According to the results of the test day, the candidates are evaluated and decided whether to take the company or not.

In one day you can get an idea of ​​a person. But on working tasks, tasks cannot be tested and understood how he will join the team.



Headz.io . This way is easier, without HR, and without a resume. When CTO registers and adds a vacancy (at the same time it is free for both the employer and the candidate), it will be shown only to those candidates who are suitable: based on position, work format (remotely or office), city, stack, salary and skills. Responsible for thisMatching algorithm - a multi-criteria learning selection algorithm. Therefore, passive and irrelevant candidates can be forgotten.


An example of a job on the platform.

When a candidate likes a job, he likes it. This means that he is “hot” - interested. CTO will see all his experience and skills in an anonymous questionnaire, which is verified by a technical interview with a platform employee.



Next, CTO will schedule an interview and call.



The employer can also not wait for feedback, but look at the profiles of developers and like them if the candidate liked it. For CTO and recruiters to whom it can delegate work, headz.io solves the problem of “manual labor”. No need to search for developers on resources and in chats, filter out inappropriate ones, call and write. All the work has already been done for you, you just need to like.

Headz.io helps candidates find jobs without wasting time, nerves and time on ridiculous vacancies, tests and questions from recruiters. He himself can choose the parameters that are necessary for him to select a vacancy, so as not to receive non-core offers, but only those that fit his technological stack, skills and requests. There are no vacancies from recruitment agencies - we check all employers carefully. Therefore, all developers are sure that the offers are real, all employers are direct (without intermediaries), and if they liked your vacancy (they liked it), then they are ready to communicate and discuss the conditions. All this takes not months, but several hours in the background, shortens the path from the candidate to the employer and saves resources.


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