More IT vacancies now appear in Russia/CIS
Read in Russian. According to a survey conducted by the leading executive recruitment company Antal Russia, there has been an increase in demand for mid-to-senior IT specialists, with an increase in vacancies showing a visible trend on the Russian labour market in comparison with the first three months of 2009. The greatest demand in the IT world has been for system administrators and service engineers – employees who are supporting and servicing the current IT infrastructure in the office.
The downturn initially affected professions such as IT directors (CIO) and managers, project managers, implementation consultants (SAP, Oracle etc.), and other people who are responsible for the development and deployment of new IT systems.
“At the beginning of the year, companies tried to cut costs and froze the integration or modernization of the new expensive IT systems,” – says Anastasiya Kishkurno, principal consultant of IT Department at Antal Russia. “Such implementation specialists were highly sought after last year and could demand salaries in the region of RUR150,000 per month for working on short term projects, yet by the beginning of the year 2009 the demand for them dropped almost to zero”.
But now some companies in the pharmaceutical, tobacco and alcohol sector as well as some banks who now find themselves in a more stable position on the current market, and are unwrapping new IT initiatives and recruiting the necessary specialists and managers for the project to get off the ground.
“If companies mostly were sitting on the fence, hesitating to launch new IT projects at the beginning of 2009, now thanks to the prosperous financial indicators and possible additional investments many of them have found money to spend on new systems, working for the profit of the overall business,” – says Irina Likhnitskaya, the head of IT technical department at Antal Russia. “Additionally the IT projects which are critical for the business are still up to date (for example the implementation of the ABS in a bank or shifting to a new billing system in a telecoms company), therefore still there is a demand in the specialists on such projects”.
The salary expectations of the candidates in IT have become more realistic than during the boom of the past few years. However if some companies reduced salaries by 25-30%, others found the possibility of increasing them at least by 5%. Such fluctuations depend very much on the industry sector that the company operates in, coupled with the stability of the company’s business.
Some companies ‘revised’ the social packages that they offer their employees, canceling some benefits such as unlimited mobile phones and internet access, life insurance, medical insurance for all family members. IT sales managers have had to make much more efforts to earn bonuses, if previously they could expect an annual bonus equal to 60% of their annual income, now in many companies it was decreased by 30%, whilst in others it is zero. Project managers could count on 30% annual bonus last year, now it decreased by 15% in average.
“If the trend which we are currently witnessing continues to develop, the recovery of the real sector will be followed with the recovery of the IT vendors and system integrators, opening new vacancies and recruiting people” – says Irina Likhnitskaya. “We are cautiously optimistic in expecting growth of the recruitment activity firstly from companies providing IT solutions critical for business and then IT companies selling infrastructural solutions”.
