Hello! My name is Katya Yudina, and I am an IT recruitment manager in Avito. In this article I will tell you why we are not afraid to hire juniors, how we came to this and what benefits we bring to each other. The article will be useful to companies that want to hire juniors, but so far are afraid to do it, as well as HRs who are willing to advance the process of replenishing the personnel reserve.
The selection of junior developers and the implementation of internship programs is not a new topic. Around her there are a lot of warnings, life hacks and ready-made cases. Each (or almost every) more or less large IT company seeks to attract novice specialists. Now it's time to tell us about our practice.
Since 2015, the number of Avito employees has been growing by ~ 20% year on year. Sooner or later, we had to face hiring problems. The market does not have time to grow middle and senior, business needs them "here and now", and it is important for us to remain effective and efficient in closing vacancies, so that the quality and speed of development do not suffer.
Vitaly Leonov, B2B Development Director: “We have not hired juniors for six or seven years since the company was founded in 2007. Then they slowly began to take them, but these were more likely exceptions to the rules. This turned out to be a very good story both for beginners and for our developers. They acted as mentors, trained the jones, and newcomers came to a large company to start positions and on a number of tasks they studied under the supervision of senior colleagues. And we decided to continue and develop this practice. ”
Training
In the selection, we have not limited ourselves to Moscow for a long time, we are looking for candidates in different cities of the Russian Federation and other countries. (You can read about the relocation program here ). However, relocation does not completely solve the problem of selecting middle and senior men: not everyone is ready for it (someone does not like Moscow, someone is used to working remotely or part-time). Then we decided to go in the direction of hiring juniors and launching an internship program in the Avito Technical Department.
First of all, we asked ourselves some simple questions.
- Is there really a need for juniors?
- What tasks can they solve?
- Do we have resources (both material and time of mentors) for their development?
- What will their development look like in a company in half a year or a year?
Having collected the information, we realized that there is a business need, we have a lot of tasks and we understand exactly how we will deal with the development of juniors. Each June and trainee, coming to Avito, knows what his career may look like in the future.
Next, it was necessary to convince managers that the time that we spend on finding ready-made “unicorns” could be much more efficient in investing in the training of younger colleagues, and in six months or a year we will have independent engineers.
I was lucky to work in a team that is ready to change and look more broadly at various issues, including hiring issues. Yes, when introducing such rates, one must be prepared for the fact that not everyone will be in favor. Convincing colleagues will help a clearly defined plan for working with novice specialists, showing real cases when hiring a junior is a plus, covering all the positive aspects of this program.
And of course, we promised the techlides that we will only recruit the most hard juniors in which we will see the potential for development. Our selection is a two-way process in which both HR and engineers are involved.
Launch
The time has come to determine the portrait of the junior, to decide what tasks we will recruit them for and describe how their adaptation will go. Who is a junior for us? This is a candidate who will be able to show development in the future 6-12 months. This is a person who shares our values (more about them here ), who can and wants to learn.
Vitaly Leonov, B2B Development Director: “We want to see those who know the theory well, ideally those who have already tried themselves in commercial development. But the basic requirement is good technical knowledge. And we will teach them all processes and practical skills. ”
The process of selecting a junior developer is not much different from an interview at the middle level. We also test their knowledge of algorithms, architecture and platforms. At the first stage, interns have a technical task (because the candidate may still have nothing to show). We can give the task of developing the API. We look at how a person approaches the matter, how to arrange README.md and so on. Next is an HR interview. We need to understand whether this particular candidate will be comfortable working in this team and with this mentor. Sometimes it happens that a candidate is not suitable for product development in our company and it makes sense to send him to a platform team, or vice versa. After an HR interview, we are holding a final meeting with a technical advisor or mentor. It makes it possible to dive into the technical aspects in more detail and understand your area of responsibility. After successfully completing the stages of the interview, the candidate receives an offer and, in the event of a positive decision, goes to our company.
Adaptation
Vitaly Leonov, B2B Development Director: “When I first started working in my first company, I really lacked a mentor, a person who would show my mistakes, suggest development paths, tell me how to do it better and faster. In fact, I was the only developer and learned from my own mistakes. It was not very good: I developed for a long time, and the company grew a good developer for a long time. If there was a person who would regularly deal with me, look at errors and help, suggest patterns and approaches, it would be much better. ”
Each novice colleague is assigned a mentor. This is a person who can and should ask different questions and from whom you will always get an answer. When choosing a mentor, we pay attention to how much time he really will have for a junior / trainee and how much he will be able to correctly and competently begin the learning process.
Senior colleague poses tasks. At the initial stage, a junior can start by analyzing bugs, then gradually diving into the development of product tasks. The mentor monitors their implementation, conducts a code review or participates in pair programming. Also in our company, the practice of 1: 1 is widespread, which gives us the opportunity to keep abreast and to resolve various issues as quickly as possible.
I, as HR, look at the process of adaptation of an employee, the leader - at the process of development and "immersion" in tasks. If necessary, we put an individual development plan for the duration of the trial period and after its completion we determine the areas for further development.
conclusions
What conclusions have we drawn from the program?
- Junior usually cannot work autonomously and independently solve all work tasks. Mentors should give them enough time to quickly adapt. This must be planned with techlides and a team.
- You need to be prepared for the fact that junior engineers will make mistakes. And this is normal.
Vitaly Leonov, B2B Development Director: “Everyone makes mistakes - the June, Middle and Senior. But mistakes are quickly found or not allowed at all - we have a well-built testing process, all products are covered by self-tests, there is a code review. And, of course, every june has a mentor who also watches all commits. ”
The selection program for novice specialists gave us the opportunity to solve several problems at once.
- To increase the personnel reserve of loyal employees who will fit our stack.
- To develop the skills of managing the team and its development at our senior employees.
- To instill a love of modern technology and quality development for young professionals.
And it was that win-win. Here are the reviews of my colleagues who came to Avito as juniors and interns.
Davide Zgyatti, junior backend developer: “ At first I did not understand what was going on, a ton of useful information came into me, but the mentor and the team strongly supported me. Due to this, after two weeks I already started working with backlog, and after three months I gradually joined the grocery development. Over a six-month internship, he received an immense amount of experience and always tried to make every effort to bring everything out of the program and remain in the team on an ongoing basis. I came to Avito as an intern, now already a junior. "
Alexander Sivtsov, front-end developer: “I have been working in Avito for a little over a year now. I came by June, now I have grown to a middle. It was a very interesting and eventful time. If we talk about the tasks performed, I can say that I did not rule for bugs (like all recently arrived) for a long time and received the first full-fledged product task in development in the first month of work.
By June I participated in a major launch of tariff updates. In addition, the guys in the team welcome, support and develop the various initiatives that I brought.
The guys in the team are trying to help not only in the development of hard skills, but also to tighten the software. Regular meetings with the leader help in this very much (I didn’t have such experience before and could only guess where I was sinking or what I should pay attention to now).
It’s very comfortable to work here, a lot of different opportunities to develop both within the company, attending all sorts of trainings, and outside it: starting from trips to conferences, ending with all sorts of goodies in partner companies. Tasks are mostly interesting than routine. I can say that complex and interesting tasks entrust Avito and the Joons. ”
Dima Afanasyev, backend developer: “I knew that I wanted to get into a big company, and with Avito it was love at first sight: I read almost the entire blog on Habré, watched reports, picked avito-tech github . I liked everything: atmosphere, technology (== stack), approach to solving problems, company culture, office. I knew that I wanted to get to Avito and decided that I would not try anything else until I knew for sure whether it worked out.
I expected the tasks to be difficult. If you create a site for three people, then it can work an hour a day, and users will be satisfied. If for 30 million people, then the simple need for data storage becomes a huge and exciting problem. My expectations came true, I can’t imagine a situation in which I would learn faster.
Now I have already been promoted to middle. In general, I became more confident and less validate my decisions, this helps to do things faster. Indeed, in any team, the speed of delivery is very important, and I often post-factum inform about all decisions made in my area of responsibility (now these are two services). There was less discussion, but the complexity of the discussion as a whole grew, and the problems became less obvious. But I also want to say this: good decisions can be promoted at any level, regardless of position. ”
Sergey Baranov, front-end developer: “It so happened that I came to the junior in Avito from a higher position, but from a small company. I always tried to absorb more information first, and then start doing something. Here, I had to start doing small tasks, just to figure out what products exist and how they interact with each other. It took about six months to completely figure out everything that my unit is doing, but by this time I was already doing my medium-sized tasks myself without any help. I would also like to note that regardless of the position you are a full-fledged member of the team, with all responsibility, trust you as a professional. All interactions are absolutely equal. I also had a development plan worked out together with my leader and I knew very well what I needed to do to develop and improve. Now I am already a middle developer and am responsible for the entire frontend in my team. "The goals have become different, responsibility has increased, as well as opportunities for further growth."
After almost a year, we see how the guys benefit the business and specific teams. During this time, several juniors became middles. And some interns showed excellent results and joined the ranks of juniors - they write code and solve complex technical problems, their eyes burn, and we provide them with professional development, an excellent atmosphere inside and strongly support in their endeavors.