Finally the elephant in the room, that people are reluctant to talk about is the calibre of candidates by age group. Eighty per cent of the employees at IBM Slovakia are under 25. Similar numbers apply to Dell (I was at their autumn party at the Design Factory in Bratislava and saw the phenomenon with my own eyes). I don't have the Siemens numbers.
In my own recruitment project, I had a mixed group of resumés for what ended up being two positions. CV's for the most part came with date of birth. The best candidates were almost invariably younger. I had no bias against hiring someone a little older.
My inclination for a more mature candidate went against the recommendation of my recruitment manager. He recommended hiring young and training up. But I was specifically seeking someone around 30 with good experience who would be ready to work. I'd rather not lose my time in training and we could afford to pay well for someone who can do the work properly straight away.
Amazingly enough the older candidates for the most part were unexceptional. The work they had done in the past was not great. Their salary demands were excessive in line with their talents. They had a bunch of skills next to useless to Foliovision (.net, ASP, Flash, java: what we needed was CSS, PHP, Rails if you're interested).
Their demonstration sites for the most part were atrocious flash catastrophes. In the best case some horrible CMS with some very basic graphics slapped on top of its out of the box layout.
One older candidate (thirty-four) who I interviewed turned out to be a catastrophe with made up stories of employment and perennial conflicts with his boss. A slightly older candidate (just over thirty) whom we took on a short trial didn't turn out well either: competent but very inflexible in her way of doing things with no inclination to learn new things.
In the social scene, I've noticed similar traits as well in the different age groups. The people who are inclined to work hard and learn here are the young. These findings are only in Bratislava. I haven't been to East or South Slovakia yet.
So despite my best intentions of hiring older and more experienced workers, I had to follow George's advice and take on younger individuals. For instance, our new junior programmer is just twenty-one. While he is somewhat less reliable than an older person (he sometimes forgets appointments both in and out of work), he does some very good work and learns very quickly.
IT salaries in Slovakia
Thanks for that link, K. That is a very useful table for me.
Anyone who is reading my original article should be sure to look at the table of IT salaries.
Dear Madam/Sir
We are looking for employees and cooperating partners in Slovakia, Czech and Germany for the Norwegian building marked.
http://www.globalkompetanse.com/globalkompetanse.htm
Please answer in English.
Are you able to help us with this?
We would very much like to come in contact with bigger, serious building companies that have competence to build wooden houses like in Scandinavia. We have projects with need of 20 – 50 workers.
Looking forward for your reply.
Best regards
Torgeir Aukland
Owner
Global Kompetanse as
4534 Marnardal
Norway
Phone +47 97511488
Fax +47 38709202