Flash Recruitment Case Study

In today’s IT industry, many companies face challenges in recruiting qualified specialists. One solution to this problem is to search for talent abroad. Our client, a Polish software house employing several dozen people, decided to hire programmers from Vietnam and was happy to share their decision-making process and recruitment process with us. What challenges did they encounter, and how did they overcome them? Did their decision prove to be successful? We invite you to read our case study, which presents our client’s story and shows how IT specialists can be effectively recruited from outside Poland.

Why did you decide to recruit programmers from the Vietnamese market?

The development of our software house not only requires staying up-to-date with new technologies and innovative solutions but also necessitates expanding the team responsible for delivering projects. The growing number of new clients and ambitious cooperation proposals also meant that we needed to hire new developers. When we began our recruitment efforts, we quickly realized that the recruitment process in Poland is time-consuming and expensive – finding a qualified employee in Poland required at least 4 to 6 months of effort. Faced with this situation in the domestic market, we decided to search for experienced specialists in other countries. While exploring information about the state of the industry abroad, we noticed that Vietnam is a place where a particular emphasis is placed on learning programming from the beginning of education in schools. This is what mainly led us to become interested in this market.

What obstacles did you face when hiring programmers from Asia?

Entering the Vietnamese market presented us with many challenges that we had to overcome in order to establish effective and mutually satisfactory working conditions. First and foremost, we had to understand both the culture and the work model that is typical for this part of Asia. We encountered difficulties such as:

• cultural differences – understanding the Vietnamese work culture made it necessary for us to develop different standards of cooperation in relation to employees from Asia and Europe;
• communication – although the level of English spoken by Vietnamese residents can be considered communicative, there are certain details (such as pronunciation or the creation of so-called “language calques”) that affect difficulties in professional contacts;
• time control – since employing workers from Asia usually involves remote work, we realized the need to use time measurement tools such as DeskTime;
• work organization – our projects are executed according to standards defined by us as well as by our clients. Therefore, it is necessary to provide support for Vietnamese teams in terms of their understanding, such as assigning tasks.

How did you solve the aforementioned problems?

Initially, the decision to open up to the Vietnamese market was not an easy one. Cultural differences, recruitment process organization, and the development of a completely remote onboarding process for developers are just some of the areas in which we lacked experience. Therefore, the support of an external agency proved to be essential in starting our foreign operations. Using the services of a recruitment company brought us benefits not only in terms of streamlining and speeding up the technical recruitment process (which affected the ease of scaling teams according to current needs), but also in terms of support in the following areas:

• employee adaptation process in a new workplace,
• conducting regular (every 6 months) feedback conversations in accordance with the Vietnamese work culture,
• organization of work for foreign teams.

What benefits have you achieved by using the Vietnamese job market?

Collaborating with Vietnamese developers in recent months has strengthened our belief that working in an international team positively impacts our work organization, which has allowed us to achieve the following benefits:

• Accelerated start of work on individual projects
• Improved quality of delivered products and services
• Minimized time spent on tasks
• Optimized employment costs for developers

The decision to start working with foreign developers not only benefits our projects and company operations, but it has also been positively received by a wide range of employees and our clients. What do they specifically say about this change?

“Thanks to collaborating with Vietnamese developers, we are able to better support clients under SLA care.”

“I appreciate that in our daily cooperation, we use English, which perfectly reflects the IT industry’s specifics.”

“We can learn from each other and solve problems faster in this way.”

Conclusion:

Finding experienced IT specialists on the market is crucial for the effective development of a software house. Especially in times of a shortage of developers on the domestic market, the decision to start international recruitment may prove to be one of the best solutions to achieve the set goals. In our case, using a recruitment agency has helped us achieve measurable benefits in this aspect and, therefore, not only build a dedicated team but also create the proper conditions for future development.