Adapting, Building, Thriving- Recruitment Insights from George Petrache, IT Team Lead

?? Reflecting on the Year-End, how do you perceive the seasonal changes that stand out?

I cannot help myself to compare this year-end with last year when the government changed the fiscal law regarding the partial elimination of tax exemptions in the IT industry. This was a big hit for the entire IT market, having a great impact on employees’ openness to other projects and perspectives of change.

HN Services chose to cover the financial differences that occurred with this new law. One year later we can easily see that it was the right call, and we hope to have created a workplace where our employees could feel secure and stable.

As I said, looking at the challenges in the IT market throughout the year, I could see a lot of candidates searching for new projects. With determination and confidence, from sourcing to employer brand marketing, we have successfully welcomed more talented colleagues, demonstrating our commitment to growth and resilience, thus increasing our team by 25%.

We can say that with a bigger recruitment team we have now the expertise to recruit almost any IT role, but as Mainframe technologies continue to play a vital role in various sectors, including finance or banking, we are still focusing on finding and still training inside our HN Training Institute, the best candidates to match these

?? With the pressure on salaries and finding good employees that also stay longer in the company, how does your team stay motivated?

What seems to be a blocker today might be an opportunity tomorrow. At first it is easy to see some difficult roles from a reluctant point of view- are we going to do this? Are we going to create from scratch a new team in Cluj-Napoca, ready to be the eyes and ears of our infrastructure and application monitoring new team, ensuring everything stays in top shape, 24/7? And the answer is yes, we are doing it, we won’t back down that easily.

This leads me to define our openness to new projects – Mainframe Monitoring project in Cluj afore mentioned - one of our greatest challenges this year so far, creating a team of 16 people with mainframe expertise from scratch.

?? How do you see the holiday season’s impact on the recruitment process, and does the team implement any specific strategies or campaigns to attract candidates toward the year-end?

It is already common knowledge that the holiday season is slower in activity than the rest of the year, but recruitment never actually stops. So, we continue to focus on job openings, actively recruiting for each one of them. Of course, there are boundaries that candidates have during the holidays, we respect them, and we stay in touch with them until they are available to start a recruitment process.

We also create our strategy for 2025, align our pipelines for future projects, staying ahead with the solutions for our clients as this is a very important aspect to maintain.