Outstaffing and smartstaffing Outstaffing and smartstaffing

The main articles are:

• Labor market in the countries of the world (IT and telecom)
• Labor market in Russia (IT and telecom)
• Labor market in Russia

If back in the 2008 crisis, "optimizing headcount" meant only staff reductions, then recently this term may refer to various types of "borrowed labor." For example, personnel leasing involving long-term - from a month or more - rental of employees or entire project teams, or outstaffing, meaning the transfer of the company's current personnel to the staff of a personnel agency that pays his salary, pays taxes for it and provides social guarantees.

The use of smartstaffing - a technology for managing the availability of human resources - enables organizations to quickly provide and attract temporarily available personnel with the necessary qualifications on a schedule or on demand, which allows:

• dispose of labor resources, minimizing its downtime and ensuring the flexibility of loading during the planned or unscheduled end of the project;
• prevent situations in which key specialists are a critical resource of the company and timely attract additional personnel with any necessary, including a unique set of competencies at optimal market value;
• increase employee motivation, both in terms of professional development and in terms of additional income;
• organize effective personnel accounting and planning, in particular the introduction of traffic management of the current load of each specialist.

IT outstaffing

2024: In which cities do IT specialists live with the highest rates per hour

SkillStaff, an IT outstaffing B2B-Marketplace, analyzed more than 5,000 active resumes on its platform to find out in which regions of Russia outstaffing IT personnel are presented. The company announced this on April 25, 2024.

The study found the most IT professionals for outstaffing in the following cities: Moscow, St. Petersburg, Ulyanovsk, Krasnodar, Rostov-on-Don, Taganrog, Novosibirsk, Omsk, Yekaterinburg and Kazan.

SkillStaff notes that mostly outstaffers prefer a remote work format. 100% remote employment is considered by IT specialists in Krasnodar and Taganrog. And only in three of the top 10 regions are candidates ready to work in the office: St. Petersburg (3%), Moscow and Kazan - the same indicator is less than 1%.

The trend towards a remote work format has not lost its relevance since the pandemic. Employers are flexible and loyal to such employees. This approach contributes to the development of IT personnel in the regions: specialists can participate in large-scale projects of federal clients that offer higher rates and better financial conditions. Thanks to this, the income of specialists from different cities is gradually compared in level with Moscow, - commented Polina Belyatskaya, executive director of SkillStaff.

Data from the study showed that the bulk of the CVs are Senior level candidates (33%) and Middle level candidates (31%). Most specialists with a high level of qualifications (Middle +, Senior, Lead) live in Novosibirsk (74% of all resumes of specialists from this city), Moscow (72%) and Krasnodar (68%).

As for medium-level IT employees, the largest percentage was recorded in Ulyanovsk (50%). Kazan and Taganrog share the second and third places in terms of the number of such specialists: the share of each of them is 38%.

Only six of the top 10 regions have entry-level Junior specialists. Kazan and Novosibirsk have the largest number of outstaffers with Junior and Junior + grades (4%).

Often, newcomers to the profession prefer to work on projects of the IT company itself, avoiding participation in outstaffing. This choice allows them to continue their gradual training while being mentored by experienced colleagues. In addition to technical skills, outstaffing requires rapid adaptation to a variety of projects and teams. Not every young specialist is ready to cope with such challenges, "said Polina Belyatskaya, executive director of SkillStaff.

SkillStaff recorded that each region is dominated by a specific specialization of outstaffers. Most system analysts are in Moscow and Yekaterinburg, manual testing specialists are in Krasnodar, and Python developers are in Rostov-on-Don. Java developers live in Kazan, St. Petersburg and Ulyanovsk.

At the same time, in Ulyanovsk there is the highest percentage of women working in the IT sphere (20% of all resumes), almost the same indicator was recorded in Kazan (19%).

The largest average rate of IT outstaffers was recorded in Novosibirsk and is 3295 rubles per hour. Also, the rating is headed by specialists from Moscow (3265 rubles/hour) and St. Petersburg (3033 rubles/hour). The minimum tariff for the services of IT employees (2696 rubles/hour) from the top 10 cities is set in Ulyanovsk.

Outstaffing of IT professionals is a model of providing business services in which the company temporarily transfers its employees to another organization, while maintaining a standard labor relationship. Such a system allows you to flexibly adjust the number of IT personnel, depending on the needs of the project and the scope of work, and does not require the mandatory admission of employees to the staff. Demand for outstaffing grew 26%, according to 2023 data from SkillStaff. As of April 2024, the platform base includes more than 11,000 trusted specialists from 354 IT companies.

2022: Every second IT company works with the bank through IT outstaffing

Specialists of the B2B marketplace SkillStaff conducted a survey among IT agencies and analyzed the changes in the IT outstaffing market. The company announced this on July 6, 2022.

The pandemic contributed to the development of telecommuting, this also affected the ways to increase IT resources. Since 2020, customers are more willing to use IT outstaffing. According to the survey, in the market for July 2022, more than 40 percent of companies provide an IT outstaffing service for about 2-3 years. 24.2 percent provide this service for the first year. Since January 2022, 67 companies have joined the platform, in total, these are 164 companies and 1800 IT specialists who are ready to start working on the project within 48 hours.

Top 3 segments that attract outstaff specialists banks:,,. IT retail The potential demand for IT outstaffing may be in the coming year in. pharmaceutical industries Online drug sales became available only from June-August 2021.

The most popular requested roles are React developer, PHP developer, Java developer, iOS and Android developers.

The problem that is noticeable in the market on the part of IT agencies is the long conclusion of an agreement with the customer. 39.5 percent of respondents conclude an agreement for more than 3 months. Such a period is associated with internal bureaucratic procedures for clients. The contract passes several instances: the customer on the part of the business, the legal department, in some cases final approval of the top management of the companies is required. For this procedure to take place faster, the process of working with IT outstaffing must be built within the company.

Outstaffing enables clients to work according to a flexible hybrid format: leave employees in charge of key business processes, while strengthening internal expertise through outstaffe, "said Polina Belyatskaya, Product Director of SkillStaff.

Smartstaffing in IT

Reasons

Any specialist in the personnel market will tell you with confidence: the most painful issue in the Russian IT sphere - there is and will be - a lack of specialists of the necessary qualifications. Growing from year to year, the demand for highly qualified IT personnel today exceeds the supply - several times.

The most important reasons for the personnel hunger in the IT sphere, as experts note, are in addition to the "demographic hole" of the 1990s, which affected the 2010s:

• the existence of a "parallel" market for non-professional players;
• weak availability of in-demand specialists;
• slow rate of recruitment personnel procedures;
• inefficient use of human resources.

Many HR specialists of design-oriented companies note with displeasure: today there are much more "non-core" applicants in the "open access" than real professionals. Some IT vacancies published on the work site sometimes receive dozens of responses. At the same time, the inflated level of salary expectations of holders of "selling" resumes does not always correspond to their real qualifications and experience. At the same time, employees with the competencies necessary in the project - "day with fire" cannot be found.

Temporarily free IT professionals prefer to look for a new job on the recommendation, through the professional community receiving information about the company inviting him to work. "Recently, there has been an active" overflow "or luring experienced IT specialists from one company to another, without them appearing on the open labor market," Svetlana Skorikova, a leading recruitment specialist at the Soft-staff talent agency, shares her impressions.

"As

a rule, competent employees are in demand and are already on staff. Many future "champions" begin their careers during their studies. Students come to companies to practice and try to build their professional careers in them, "adds Zoya Bogdashkina, head of IT for recruiting at the Luxoft Personnel recruiting center

.

Despite the efforts of experienced "bounty hunters" and management selection experts, "sweet gingerbread is always not enough for everyone" - the search for a competent specialist with the required specialization is sometimes delayed for several months.

For example, try to find a good Java developer or Oracle/.NET programmer, data transfer specialist or system architect on OEBS/Sun Solaris platforms for a project in a couple of days. Only venerable people know "where to get it and how to persuade" a test engineer or database administrator of Oracle, SQL, as well as an SAP consultant with experience in implementing projects in a certain area.

Depending on the urgency of the need and the uniqueness of the upcoming tasks, the salaries offered to scarce specialists also differ. "The head of one of the main groups in the project for the implementation of the SAP system today can be offered a salary and 180,000 and 250,000 rubles, depending on the size of the company and the scale of the project. The project managers may have this "fork" for remuneration even more - from 180 to 300 thousand, and this is not the limit, "says Alina Mayorova, an expert on project recruitment of the Team Force group of companies

.

It seems that the pace of automation of Russian companies using ERP systems is rapidly ahead of the modest capabilities of our universities that graduate from relevant specialists. Especially rare and exotic "trend" specialists, such as developers of web applications based on HTML5, CSS3 or JavaScript with knowledge of jQuery, if they suddenly have an urgent need, do not prepare any university - and sometimes they cannot be found for any money. And if we are not talking about an individual person, but, say, about a project team for an SAP project that can quickly master the front of work on the customer's territory, difficulties immediately increase exponentially.

The irreconcilable competition for scarce specialists, which is conducted by companies, IT outsourcers, recruiting and consulting agencies, during the selection of labor resources for the most attractive and expensive projects, is often interrupted by a "water truce." Life dictates to recruiters the need for joint action. "The most common subcontracting practice in our work is the additional involvement in the project team of specialists of partner companies who" understaffe "the IT project with" missing "professional competencies," says Zoya Bogdashkina from Luxoft Personnel.

The acute shortage of IT personnel resources forces top managers to be sensitive to their full-time specialists, preserving at all costs human capital, which is difficult to find a replacement in the labor market. "For me as a manager, the main value is represented by specialists," notes Elena Novikova, CEO of Polymedia, "and they have the more significance for us, the longer they have worked in the company, the more they understand the specifics of our business. At the end of each next project, we do not want to lose the accumulated expertise when dismissing key employees. Otherwise, you will again have to engage in a laborious search for resources. "

Practice

Despite this irrational use of its "gold fund" turns out to be really "gold" for the budget of IT companies in terms of direct costs - top managers face the need to pay for downtime and underutilization of highly qualified staff. It is difficult for the uninitiated to even imagine what, for example, a multi-day "forced idleness" of a certified system engineer from Oracle, Microsoft, IBM, Documentum, HP, and even more so a rare specialist today who understands several basic systems at the same time.

"Key IT professionals in certain situations - and in practice quite often - are the company's critical resource. It only seems to managers that the main problem is to attract and retain qualified labor resources - today for many IT companies the main problem is how to "dispose of" them, "" says Olga Zarubina, deputy director for human resources at the consulting company OJSC OXS.

The availability of resources, their timely disposal - the transfer of these well-known "IT" indicators of management efficiency to the field of personnel management may at first glance seem too "technocratic," but on reflection - looks quite justified and reasonable. The disposal of resources in this context means - to find a decent use of "expensive" specialists in every sense, minimize their downtime, ensure their flexible loading during the planned or unscheduled end of the project - and therefore reduce personnel costs. "The main indicator of the good availability of labor resources, and to a large extent the high efficiency of the business," adds Ruslan Gainanov, director of the Moscow office of the Team Force group of companies - "is the ability to involve the right number of specialists with the right qualifications at any time - on schedule or on demand."

The strategic need to reduce labor costs is now recognized by many IT organizations - after all, the cost of "intellectual" labor occupies the lion's share of the cost of almost any IT project. At the same time, the ways to reduce costs are quite diverse. You can, for example, abandon expensive corporate parties and coffee machines in the office. Or "cut off" extended social packages for "bursting IT specialists" who are not too interested in insurance treatment, but they are not at all averse to receiving personal professional certificates at the expense of the company. However, the eichars, who have been engaged in the selection of personnel in the high-tech market for years, agree that the most radical and popular saving measure is undoubtedly the use of modern personnel technologies.

By "renting" a specialist through an agency, the employer gets the opportunity for a longer period than stipulated in labor law to test his professional competencies, and then, finally, to hire an employee to work in the state without spending money on his adaptation in the team. An employee, functioning in leasing mode, also does not remain on the payroll, receiving additional earnings and the opportunity to work on a more flexible schedule, "comments Olga Zarubina

.

At the same time, professional agencies, on conditions of personnel outsourcing, are ready to take away from their clients a "headache" - administrative and time costs for maintaining personnel workflow, accounting, and reporting. But the fastest pace in the IT sphere, as statistics show, is growing today the demand for the service of providing IPF - "temporary labor collectives," in the operational version - the temporary staffing service - hiring specialists for a period of several hours to a month with an hourly wage.

The use of personnel leasing and other promising forms of personnel rental allows companies to avoid a long and costly procedure for finding the necessary employees and makes achievable the "blue dream" of any HR manager - to optimize the labor resources of his company, keeping in the staff a minimum number of the most versatile specialists. It is not surprising that the number of employees hired by Russian IT companies under "temporary" contracts has increased eightfold over the past 2 years.

At the same time, serious companies with dozens of open projects have little chance of attracting the right number of specialists with the right qualifications to work at the right time. And quite science fiction is to do it for reasonable money. "Since the requirements of customers for the number and qualifications of design specialists are constantly increasing, the main criterion for recruiting personnel is the real availability of the required competencies of" InTime "- that is, at a given period of time. For example, on Wednesday, from 12.00 to 18.00 I am ready to use the services of a specialist. On Thursday at 10.00 I no longer need this specialist. Here, first of all, the rule applies: a testicle for a red day is good, "emphasizes Ruslan Gainanov, director of the Moscow office of the Team Force Group of Companies.

From time to time, the idea of ​ ​ more flexible and rational loading of personnel comes to mind for more or less sane managers. However, a very small number of companies can completely "attach" their specialists or at least boast of having a clear personal download schedule for each of them. As a response to the need for business to minimize personnel costs, a technology for managing the availability of personnel resources - smartstaffing (English smart - "smart" + English staff - "staff") has appeared.

"Many

IT companies today need the most flexible forms of resource provision at the time and in the place where and when it is necessary, and appreciate the possibility of preliminary reservation of expertise for upcoming projects," said Svetlana Skorikova, a leading recruitment specialist at Soft-staff.

Smartstaffing, as a human resources technology built on the basis of modern communications tools, enables organizations to provide and attract temporarily available personnel of any necessary qualifications using the "exchange pool" available through the Internet portal at a strictly defined time - according to a pre-set schedule or a one-time request.

"Using the smartstaffing scheme, the employer - the owner of the resource provides to the open labor market information about the professional competence of its full-time specialist available for a certain period of time and about the readiness to offer it to the consumer at a certain market price (the cost of a man-hour, consult day, etc.)," - explains Ruslan Gainanov from Team Force. - "The employer - consumer of competence confirms his interest in attracting this specialist and reserves his competence with subsequent acquisition as a service available on schedule or on demand."

For the customer of a personnel resource, it does not matter in the staff of which company a specialist with the functionality he needs is initially located, even if he is in the status of a freelancer, the main thing is that he is currently present in the "competence cloud" - a special virtual service created on the basis of combining information resources and employer databases. At the same time, the role of the smartstaffing service provider is dispatching a one-time transaction or a pre-established schedule for using a specialist or team that simultaneously suits both the owner and the consumer of resources.

According to fans of the new idea, the use of an integrated remote labor management system will allow employers to easily and quickly navigate various proposals for temporarily available labor resources, choosing the optimal time/price/quality ratio for themselves, based on their budget, complexity and scale of tasks. Apparently, in the context of an objective shortage of IT specialists, smartstaffing will become the optimal opportunity for many companies to effectively distribute the load of key employees to different tasks and for different employers. At the same time, qualified specialists will receive wide prospects in terms of motivation, the development of personal expertise and capitalization.

According to forecasts of experts of the personnel market, in the coming years it is safe to talk about the growing demand for leasing and smartstaffing services from Russian and foreign companies, as well as about the growth of the quality of the services provided and the expansion of their application areas.

Outsourcing in the Pharmaceutical Industry

2017: Unity: 60% of pharmaceutical companies in the Russian market use outsourcing

According to the observations of the personnel company Unity, in 2017 the business began to use outsourcing more often: the labor market is coming to life - companies are recruiting new employees and looking for third-party providers more actively than two to three years ago. Interestingly, this optimization method is used not only in cases with seasonal or field employment, but also to solve current problems. One of the areas where outsourcing has proven itself well is pharmaceuticals. Unity conducted a survey among pharmaceutical companies and found that 60% of them somehow resort to the services of various providers - this is 20% more than two to three years ago.

Such a high percentage of outsourcing use is associated with the active development of the pharmaceutical business. In the first three quarters of 2017, according to AlphaRM, the pharmaceutical market reached 863.54 billion rubles and 3.8 billion packages - this is 7% more in monetary terms and 2% in kind compared to the same period in 2016. Outsourcing is in great demand here as a way to reduce costs and get a high quality service.

"The pharmaceutical

industry has never been without outsourcing at all, but now the volume has increased markedly. If two or three years ago it was at best 43-45% of companies, today it is no less than 60%. In 2015, outsourcing was mainly used by large pharmaceutical companies, today this tool is also used by smaller market players, "said Victoria Prostova, head of practice at Pharma & Medical Devices of the personnel company Unity.

According to her, in 2017, the pharmaceutical business more often began to outsource historically atypical tasks for this, for example, labor protection and personnel workflow. This is facilitated not only by the saving of the company's resources, but also by the development of the outsourcing sector itself - more and more providers offer a comprehensive turnkey solution to problems, which is extremely convenient.

" Russia Most often, this optimization tool is used by those who work in the legal field, regardless of the field of activity," explains Vladislav Lobanov, General Director of the personnel company Unity. - In the illegal field, outsourcing (especially in production) is simply not interesting - such a business is more familiar with tax fraud. But as the company tightens its control states , it will be forced to move to the legal sector - and outsourcing will be more and more in demand. "

Its main advantage is economy. So, according to Unity, when transferring business processes to a professional provider, it is possible to reduce costs by up to 20% due to their transformation, comprehensive optimization and elimination of risks associated with the human factor. But representatives of pharmaceutical companies participating in the survey note that they went to work with third-party contractors not only and not so much out of a desire to save money. The most important KPIs that pharmaceutical companies put before the provider are minimizing errors and high expertise, performing work on time and complying with legal requirements.

The survey participants identified five main advantages of outsourcing:

• expertise and experience. "It happens that in some matter the company does not have a sufficiently large examination, and it is expensive and impractical to buy the relevant professional. Then outsourcing is very convenient, "says Svetlana Mayorova, HR business partner of Reckitt Benckiser. In addition, an experienced external provider is usually always ready to offer its own strategy for overcoming problem situations;
• Resource optimization. When a professional provider is engaged in mechanical tasks, the company has more time and effort to solve strategic business issues;
• high quality of services. "Two years ago, personnel administration was organized on its own, but the internal system was and still is on global service in India. It is very difficult to combine it with our realities, so we did a lot of handmade work. The costs were colossal, and the quality suffered. Therefore, we outsourced personnel administration. The way it is built now works much better than two years ago, and without increasing costs, "Natalya Komarova cites an example, at the time of the survey - HR Director of the international pharmaceutical company Dr. Reddy's in Russia, now - Director of Personnel in Russia and CIS Linde Gas;
• flexibility of the staff structure. As Alina Mantseva, HR Director for Russia and Eurasia for AstraZeneca, explains, outsourcing eliminates the financial and time costs of replacing employees in the event of dismissal, sick leave or vacation, and without loss of quality;
• compliance with the law, and not only in terms of taxes. "Outsourcing helped us solve the problem that arose due to amendments to the law on personal data, which should now be stored in the Russian Federation. But we, like 99% of global companies, have servers abroad. We transferred personnel administration to an external provider, and now we keep full personal data of employees in Russia, and on the international server - only minimal information, without violating anything, "explains Natalya Komarova.

Pharmaceutical companies prefer to give professional providers routine processes that require deep knowledge of the issue, but are not related to the key business task. These are accounting services, personnel administration, recruitment and HR service, IT support and services of medical representatives.

It is curious that it is the above tasks that Russian business is most often afraid to outsource. To assign these functions to an external provider, a very high degree of trust is needed between the client company and the provider company, because we are talking about full disclosure of information.

For example, HeadHunter found that companies are not ready to transfer the personnel accounting function to an external provider, because they do not understand the data storage system (52%), are afraid for their safety (41%) and do not trust strangers (34%). A similar situation in IT outsourcing: as Victoria Pavlova, a leading recruiting specialist at IT/Telecom Unity, notes, most companies have at least one programmer in the state who is fully immersed in the company's internal processes, and they turn to outsourcing only to solve one-time large-scale problems.

As Felix Kugel, managing director of the personnel company Unity, adds, outsourcing is still something someone else's for our country: "In Russia, it is more difficult to learn than in countries where business and society are more open. Our entrepreneurs are used to increasing profits by increasing volumes, and not by structuring their business. Meanwhile, there is huge potential in outsourcing. "

The tendency to outsource some of the tasks is taking over more and more areas of business, because when calculating it, it turns out to be really cheaper. For example, the automotive industry is now actively outsourcing. Thus, pharmaceuticals sets a new trend, using its example to show that with a competent selection of the provider, the risks are minimal. Thus, survey participants recommend paying attention to how long the provider has been providing this service on the market, with which clients it works, who left it and why. At the same time, it is necessary to clearly spell out in the contract what criteria and under what conditions termination is possible.

"If we are talking about outsourcing processes related to finance, labor law, and so on, there must be a person inside who controls the situation, because legally your company will be responsible for all mistakes. We have very strict legislation, but you should not be afraid of outsourcing - you need to count everything, set control points correctly and conduct an audit in a timely manner, "advises Natalya Komarova

.

See also

• IT services market in Russia (outsourcing)
• The largest SAP solution support outsourcers. Ranking TAdviser 2017
• The largest SAP solution support outsourcers in Russia: TAdviser 2014 ranking
• Major SAP Solution Support Outsourcers - TAdviser 2013 Ranking
• The largest SAP solution support outsourcers in Russia: TAdviser 2012 ranking
• Business Process Outsourcing (Global Market) Business Process Outsourcing (BPO)
• Accounting functions outsourcing: accounting, payroll and personnel accounting (Russian market)
• IT outsourcing (global market)
• IT outsourcing (Russian market)
• Comprehensive Print Management Services - Managed Print Services, MPS, Global Market Outsourcing
• Integrated printing management services - outsourcing of printing (Russian market) Managed Print Services, MPS