The cost of recruiting a single IT developer in Romania

The cost is expected to grow in the coming years, as the deficit of IT professionals will deepen further. SDA predicts that as by the end of 2020, the deficit of programmers and software testers in Romania will reach between 40,000 and 50,000 professionals and the competition for existing IT talent between the companies will intensify significantly, thus further increasing the cost per hire.

To respond to this growing crisis in the IT market, SDA has launched in Romania a personalized recruitment process for corporations, which targets junior IT professionals. Under the program, which has already been successfully launched and implemented on other markers of activity, including Poland, SDA will not only find the right IT employees, but also manage their training and onboarding process. Given the deficit of the IT graduates in Romania, when implementing such programs to Romanian corporations, SDA will focus on forming new IT professionals by providing the re-skilling courses.

“It is no longer be cost-efficient or time-efficient for the human resources department to fight for the same pool of professionals already present on the market. Corporations need to start looking for fresh IT talent elsewhere. Our answer to this issue is a corporate reskilling project under which, corporations will recruit non-IT people from the market and provide them tailor-made trainings to teach them exactly the skills that are needed in the company. We have successfully rolled out such projects on other markets and we are confident that this is the future of the IT recruitment, which provides the solution to the ever-growing deficit in Romania”, said Piotr Mazur, CEO at Software Development Academy Romania.

The process of hiring a single new employee for an IT department carries significant costs taking into consideration the time invested by management and the HR team. Global research indicates that average recruitment for in an IT industry takes on average 30 days.

According to Salesforce Research, 68% of recruiters perceive hiring in IT as a greater challenge than five years ago, and 30% of companies have difficulty finding qualified employees. 

The costs of recruiting new personnel vary greatly between start-ups, where the hiring is often handled by the top management or corporations, which means that the actual cost of recruitment is even higher, and corporations. Global research estimates that small business owners spend around 40% of their working hours on tasks that do not generate income, such as hiring.

The cost of recruitment of an IT developer in Romanian was compiled by SDA taking into account two key variables, which is a monthly average gross salary of HR consultant of 5,418 lei (estimated 50 lei/hour of work); and a monthly average gross salary of IT specialist of 10,840 lei.

The speed of recruitment as well as the interest of the candidates in applying depends heavily on the attractiveness of the company. Therefore, lack of employer branding can significantly extend the process of recruitment, in turn becoming even more costly.

An important aspect of recruitment is also the onboarding process, during which the employee acquires specific skills necessary to carry out his job within the organization. Global research suggests that it takes 3 to 6 months for a new hire to achieve full productivity, the time during which the company is losing money as the employee costs are more than what they are earning for the company. The exact time it takes for the employee to reach productivity depends heavily on the complexity of the job. At the same time, the first months are crucial when it comes to the employee’s satisfaction with the job. Additional to the costs above, there is a risk at any point that the candidate will resign either by not accepting the offer or by quitting within the first 6 months of the job before reaching full productivity, thus requiring the process to be resumed. 

Taking into consideration the high competition for IT talent in Romania and the fact that the pool of IT professionals is not growing as fast as the demand, thus making the recruiters compete with each other for the same talent.

This also means that the rotation of IT developers is higher than in other professions, which means they disappear from the market much faster than other professionals and consequently, their recruitment should be as fast and effective as possible.

Software Development Academy (SDA) is the largest IT programming school in Central and Eastern Europe that enables its students to acquire fast (within 3-7 months) competences in programming and software testing. Established in 2014 in Poland, SDA begun offering courses in Romania in January 2018. SDA’s primary clients are active professionals between 25-50 years old who wish to change their career and begin working in the IT field. For B2B clients, which include multinational corporations, and institutions, SDA takes care of recruitment, training and initiating entire groups of IT professionals as well as upskilling or reskilling of their employees. SDA is currently present in Poland (15 cities), United Kingdom, Ireland, Romania, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, as well as in Finland. In Romania, the company delivers training courses in Bucharest, Cluj, Timisoara, Iasi, Craiova, Oradea, Constanta, and Galati.