How to Hire Software Engineers, DevOps, or other IT Professionals from Eastern Europe and Ukraine for the Best Rates

If you are reading this article most likely it is because you want to build (or already building) a team of talented developers, DevOps, QAs, Business Analysts, and UI/UX Designers who will create software in a timely manner that your clients will love.?

In the process, it is important to keep salary expenses on an adequate level, because you have other expenses, including investments in sales and marketing and operational costs.?

But you can't sacrifice the quality of the team. You need talented IT professionals for the best rates.?

I don't know how your company works - is there a requirement to work in the office, or do you allow people to work remotely and your employees work in different cities or even countries?

In any case, what I will tell you now will help you hire talented specialists faster and on favorable terms.?

But why should you believe me??

Let me introduce myself.?

My name is Vadym Lobariev and I have been engaged in IT recruiting for 18 years.?

I live in Kyiv, Ukraine, and together with my team we help American and European software development companies that do not have or have a small recruiting department to find IT specialists in Ukraine, Eastern Europe, or in other countries at the request of clients.

We have helped many companies, so I can assure you that we are experts in IT recruiting.

What you learn today can help you find great IT specialists on favorable terms and start conducting interviews with them in 2-7 days.

Why do you want to consider hiring full-time contractors from Eastern Europe and Ukraine?

Eastern Europe is one of the most favored destinations for outsourcing by companies from the US and UK.

According to the Developer Economics Survey, Eastern Europe has the second-largest concentration of developers in Europe after Western Europe. There are more than 2 million developers in Eastern European countries alone.?

What about Ukraine??

Until February 24, 2022, there were about 285,000 IT specialists in Ukraine, and the main tech hubs were located in Kyiv, Lviv, Kharkiv, Dnipro, and Odesa. Because of the full-scale war, from 17% to 20% of IT specialists went abroad (Europe, the US, Asia, etc.).?

Another 2.5% of IT specialists went to defend Ukraine. So today the approximate number of IT specialists in Ukraine reaches 228,000 people. This is stated in the results of the IT Research Resilience study presented by the Lviv IT Cluster.

Is it safe to work in Ukraine now?

Here on this map below you can see where the hostilities are currently taking place, occupied and liberated territories.

The territories occupied by the Russian Federation are marked in red. The battle lines are there.?

Liberated territories are marked in green.

The territories of Ukraine where combat operations are not conducted are periodically bombarded by missiles and drones, but many people live and businesses operate in these territories.?

According to the Kyiv city administration, the number of people in Kyiv in 2023 is equal to the number of people before the full-scale invasion. These data were taken from the number of active subscribers of mobile operators.

In the autumn and winter of 2022/2023, the Russian Federation often bombarded the territory of Ukraine with missiles and drones.?

Energy infrastructure facilities were hit, resulting in blackouts. The light was given according to the schedule or turned off without warning when there were critical accidents.

Starting from January 2023, there are no more problems with blackouts, because the energy infrastructure has been established.?

Also, foreign partners provided us with air defense and missile defense systems that protect the sky of Ukraine.?

Currently, the effectiveness of air-defense systems in Ukraine is around 93%.

This means that if IT specialists are located in the central, western, and northern territories of Ukraine, usually they can work without problems.?

They should have access to the Internet and should not have problems with electricity. This also applies to the eastern and southern regions of Ukraine, which are not occupied by the Russian Federation.

Because of the war, there are fewer vacancies and lower salary expectations, so it is easier to find candidates on better terms.

What salaries should you expect if you decide to hire IT specialists in Ukraine or Eastern Europe?

The most popular vacancies in the IT field are backend, frontend, or full-stack developers. Then there are DevOps, QA Engineers, Managers (CTO, Engineering, Project, Product), Business Analysts, Designers, Support Specialists, Technical Writers, and others.

In order not to overwhelm you with a large number of statistics, let's make it simpler. If you take any specialty, be it Backend Developer or DevOps, you can divide specialists into three conditional categories: junior, middle, and senior.?

Relatively speaking: Junior is an IT specialist with 1-2 years of experience, Middle has 2-4 years of experience and Senior has 4+ years of experience.?

Salary expectations of candidates in Eastern Europe and Ukraine are approximately equal. Let’s discuss the salary levels of the positions that I mentioned above one by one.

We talk about Gross (with taxes) monthly salary in USD (actual for the 2023 year)

Is it easier to find candidates in Ukraine and Eastern Europe for IT vacancies now than in 2021?

Before the full-scale invasion, the IT market in Ukraine was very hot because many foreign companies were interested in hiring Ukrainian IT specialists. There were thousands of open vacancies, which led to a rapid increase in salaries.

After the start of the full-scale invasion, the number of vacancies decreased, and some companies cut staff. Now there are fewer vacancies, so it is easier to find good IT specialists.

As a smart representative of a software development company from the USA or Europe, you can use this opportunity and hire talented IT specialists from Ukraine and Eastern Europe on very favorable terms.?

Some Ukrainian IT specialists remained in Ukraine, and some left for European countries. If your team works remotely, you can consider hiring Ukrainians who have temporarily moved to other countries.

Also, as I mentioned above there are around 2 million developers in Eastern Europe in such countries as Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, Czech Republic, Slovenia, Slovakia, Hungry, and others.??????

How to hire IT specialists in Eastern Europe and Ukraine if you don’t have a legal entity in this geo?

There are the following options for hiring candidates:

1. Direct b2b contract
2. Cooperation with outsourcing or out-staffing companies
3. Global HR platform

Direct b2b contract

In the case of a direct contract, you sign the contract directly with the IT specialist. It is a b2b contract. For example, in Ukraine, about 90% of IT specialists work as Private Entrepreneurs. Taxes for private entrepreneurs are 5% of income and a single social tax is about $40 per month.?

Different countries have different tax systems. Some taxes are fixed, and some depend on income or field of activity. But in general, you can count on taxes of 5-20% of income.

In some countries, there are ‘business incubators’ which help people who have not registered as 'Private Entrepreneur' to work as a contractor.?

Recently we were working with a UK SaaS company and were looking for candidates in Poland. All our candidates decided to use a business incubator as an option for signing a b2b contract with our Client. This business incubator charges 7,5% of income and $40 of the monthly fee.??

Outsourcing or out-staffing companies.

In the case of working with outsourcing or out-staffing companies, you will receive a comprehensive service.?

Usually, such companies have their own recruiting department, which will search for candidates for you. Sometimes additional money is charged for this, sometimes the cost is included in future payments.?

Having a direct contract with IT specialist, you don't have to pay extra money, as in the case of working with outsourcing or out-staffing companies, which additionally take a commission from each hired employee every month.?

In the case of a direct contract, you pay a salary and possibly give additional benefits in the form of equipment, vacation, sick pay, and insurance. In the case of work with outsourcing or out-staffing companies, the costs per employee will be 1.5-2 times more, because these companies will charge additional commissions.

As I mentioned above, usually working through an outsourcing company you will pay 1.5-2 times more for each employee than in the case of direct hiring. This model is more expensive but has advantages because the company takes over recruiting and various administrative and legal functions.

Global HR platform

The third option is to work with a Global HR platform like a Deel.?

They offer various options for hiring employees and take care of all paperwork and taxes, including ‘contract of employment’ and b2b contracts.?

As an employer, you can choose a subscription model that meets your requirements starting at $599 per month if you want to hire employees and starting at $49 per month in case you want to manage and pay international contractors.?

If you decided to choose a direct contract with IT specialists, then the question arises - where to search for candidates?

You can use job ads on various sites, and social networks, primarily LinkedIn.?

In this way, you will be able to attract candidates who are actively looking for a new job. According to various data, such candidates are no more than 15-20% of the total number of specialists. Therefore, if you use job ads, you can count on the fact that a small number of specialists with the qualifications you need will learn about your vacancy.

And what about the remaining 80-85%? It is obvious that some of these candidates are completely satisfied with their work and will not want to consider anything. But a large part of specialists from this group will not mind considering new vacancies if there is a more interesting project, newer technologies, better financial conditions, or some other factors.

We call these candidates “passive candidates”. Because they are not actively looking for a new job, but are not against considering interesting vacancies. And the method that allows you to find and contact them is called “sourcing”.

Any company dreams of passive candidates, because they are not active in the labor market and competitors do not know about them.

But you can get such candidates if you find them and tell them about your vacancies.

Easier said than done.?

And if you've ever been involved in sourcing, you know that it takes a lot of time.

The reliable method to speed up the sourcing of candidates and start interviewing candidates not later than in a week?

The good thing is that there are IT recruiting agencies that can do this for you for a small percentage of the candidate's salary.

By choosing to outsource your candidate search, you can devote your attention to your areas of expertise, whether that's sales, marketing, product development, or company management.?

This approach not only allows you to conserve both time and money on recruitment but also helps you secure top IT professionals available in the market.

For example, my agency MindHunt has been working for more than 12 years.?

We have a lot of experience in finding candidates for IT vacancies in Ukraine, European countries, and even around the world.?

At first, we worked in Ukraine, but then our clients began to show interest in other countries, and therefore we began to search in Poland, the Czech Republic, the UK, Portugal, Denmark, and other countries.

All our recruiters are fluent in English, and some even know Polish and Italian.

On average, it takes us 2 to 7 days to find and recommend you the first candidates who meet your requirements.

One of our clients is a Danish company that builds software and devices for hearing care professionals. For this company, we are looking for candidates in Poland, Great Britain, and Denmark, as well as in countries with time zones close to Australia.

Another client is a company that develops a platform for social media influencers. We started working with this company on vacancies in Ukraine, but then, at the client's request, we expanded our search to European countries.?

Now they decided to focus on Portugal, where we recently closed a Full-stack Developer vacancy for them.

As you can see, we have experience in finding IT personnel in various European countries and beyond. Once you start working with us, you can start interviewing our candidates in less than a week.

Just imagine that you give us a vacancy and no later than a week, you are already conducting interviews with candidates, which we sourced, interviewed, and selected according to your requirements.

How can we do this??

We have tens of thousands of candidates in the database and we know our market very well because we search for IT specialists every single day.?

If you want to use the power of the IT recruiting agency MindHunt to find IT specialists in Europe, Ukraine, or other countries, I will be happy to talk with you and show you how you can hire talented IT specialists on favorable terms fast.?

To book a call just click this link. When you click on the link, a page opens where you can choose a convenient day and time for the call. After registration, you will receive a confirmation email with a link to Google Meet.?

Thank you for your attention and hope to see you on the call.?

Sincerely,

Vadym Lobariev