How to evaluate a job offer

The standard trial period for a new employee is three months. During this time, the company will have time to understand whether you will be useful to it and whether your skills and knowledge match their expectations. A new employee in the first months of work also assesses the company - how much it meets its expectations and how comfortable it is to work in it. But for an employee, more time is needed for evaluation — according to statistics from our agency's recruiters, the employee leaves the company after six months of work, if something went wrong at the new place.
The reasons may be different: the relationship with the manager has not developed, the team is not satisfied, etc. To avoid disappointment from a new place after a long search for vacancies, interviewing and painful waiting for a decision from companies, you need to evaluate offers and make the right employer choice. After so much time has been spent on finding a new job, it is important not to spoil everything at the selection stage. In the article we have collected tips that will help you with this.

Select criteria for company valuation

So, the job offer is in your hands. So the company has already passed your primary selection and now is the time to think about the remaining requirements for future work. In general, it is difficult to give advice on the choice of criteria, because each will have their own. Over the past year I have changed jobs twice and I have something to tell about my mistakes. I will not give the names of the companies, let it be a startup A and a large company B.

Before going to a startup, I worked for a long time in an office not far from my home, in the morning and in the evening I took no more than half an hour by public transport. Company A’s office was located at the other end of Moscow and it took an hour to get to it if you took the subway and bus. A few weeks later, I realized that regular and long trips on the subway are too tiring for me. After moving to company B, the road to the office began to occupy the same hour, but now it is possible to combine the MCC and the bicycle, and this is much more comfortable for me. Model your trip to the new office and try to understand how best and more comfortable you will get, because one or two trips for interviews will not give you a full understanding.
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For all the time I have accumulated many years of experience in software development and testing. During the interview with the leaders of the startup A, I had a positive impression about engineering and I did not ask questions about the processes and development tools. And in vain. Because the level of development was low and had to work hard to bring it to the level adopted in large companies. There are no unnecessary questions at the interview. It is better to ask than to be disappointed later in their assumptions.

With the leaders of the company. And we had an agreement - in the future I will head the testing department, but for the period of the probationary period I will work as an engineer. By accepting a job offer, I knew that in the future testing department a few more employees would come out for me a few days earlier, who also had ambitions. As a result, instead of constructive work, there was competition between two employees, which only harmed the work. In case of a successful outcome of the interview, it will not be superfluous to ask you to meet your future colleagues and arrange a meeting with your future leader if he was not present at the interview.

Company A grew rapidly and it became crowded in the office. Therefore, I was put a desktop instead of a guest sofa near the entrance to the office. Every day I involuntarily saw who and when he comes to the office in the morning and goes home in the evening. Focusing on the work did not help even headphones with music. Ask your future manager to make you a tour of the office and show your workplace.

During my career I changed six companies and I formed my list of criteria for an employer:

- a strong team of engineers, working with whom I can learn and grow professionally
- an interesting project or product
- high software quality standards adopted by the company
- if a star engineer is working in the company, then for me this will be an additional argument for choosing a company. For example, Parallels worked for Alexey Kuznetsov, one of the authors of the TCP / IP stack in the Linux kernel
- medical insurance
- social package
- travel time

You will have your own list of criteria, but you can take mine as a basis.

Find reliable sources of information

When hiring a new employee, recruiters use every opportunity to learn more about the applicant before making an offer to him. In the course go and monitoring accounts in social networks and search for common friends recruiter and the applicant or former colleagues of the applicant in order to get an opinion about the person from the side and increase the chances of successful hiring. And what are you worse? This is a market and not only the company chooses you, but also you company. So do not hesitate to make inquiries about the company, the future manager and the project in which you have to work. How to do it - read on.

Perhaps the most unbiased source of information may be your former colleagues and friends who have already worked for this company. They do not need to hide something from you and they will tell you how the company looks from the inside. Details are revealed that you will never know about at the interview.



If you have not found such friends, you can contact the Spice IT Agency for a free consultation. Agency recruiters will help to find such people and share their contacts.

The network has specialized websites, chat rooms and forums where company employees share their feedback on the employer. For experts in the field of software testing, for example, this is the QABadCompany chat in Telegram. Interesting reviews about IT companies are left on the Ukrainian software development portal developers.org.ua. But there, unfortunately, mostly information about Ukrainian companies. The popular resource Glassdoor will help with reviews if the company is international.

Open data of the Federal Tax Service will help to indirectly get an idea of ​​the state of the company. By law, each company is obliged to publish data on income and expenditure once a year. And if you want to work in a startup, it will be reasonable to find out whether the company has self-sufficiency. If there is no profit, then come up with plan B in the event that the investors' money runs out. And from June 1, 2018, the company's information on the average number of employees will be open in accordance with Federal Law No. 134- “On Amendments to Article 102 of Part One of the Tax Code of the Russian Federation”. Comparing the information on the number of employees over the past few years, one can understand whether there have been massive reductions over the past year. Reductions in the company can be for various reasons and it is difficult to make any conclusions based on this information, but this is a reason to ask the recruiter about the reasons for the reductions.

You should not rely heavily on information about the company in the media articles - there may be both custom-made articles and articles from the PR staff of the company itself. Reviews even from outsiders on social networks will be truer.

Personal experience

We asked the guys who found a job with the help of our recruiters to answer questions about the assessment of companies before employment. Anton Martynov is a Full Stack developer at Market Music, and Vladimir Pavlovsky is a senior software developer at the National Credit Bureau.


Anton Martynov , .Net developer. I was looking for remote work on the stack of MS SQL, ASP.NET and Angular2 technologies. Had three offers on hand when he met Market Music. Successfully passed all the stages of the interview in this company, received an offer and decided to work with them.


Vladimir Pavlovsky , software developer and enthusiast mathematician. I was looking for a job where I could combine commercial development with scientific work. In addition, there was a desire to work with open source and at least part of the time to work remotely. Fifty interviews took place in a year, and only in three companies did the negotiations continue. The final choice fell on the National Credit Bureau.

What influenced your choice in favor of a company in the decision-making process?

Anton : I made the decision after the interview. I liked the friendly attitude, professional approach to the development, the use of modern tools. There were no requirements for non-standard work schedules (as is sometimes the case with Western customers), the development of non-core or outdated technologies and special knowledge (such as bank credit schemes, trading platforms, etc.).

Vladimir : First of all, my decision was influenced by the positive reaction of future colleagues to my desire to devote a significant part of my work time to mathematical modeling. Secondly, the organization works closely with the HSE - two colleagues work part-time teachers there, and this has a positive effect on the atmosphere in the team as a whole. Thirdly, I managed to agree on a flexible seven-hour working day and quite good compensation.

What were these sources of information?

Anton : First I searched in open sources: official website, articles about the company, mentions in social networks, employee search history and other general information.
Then he formed on the basis of this preliminary questions that asked the recruiter. Finally, asked all the questions about the company at the interview.

Vladimir : Googled news about the company, googled individual employees, got in touch with its predecessor.

Did you have any disappointments in a new place because of some things that you did not know before entering a new job?

Anton : There are no disappointments yet.

Vladimir : The initial agreements were about working on mathematical models using the economic domain, but it turned out that the system requires serious changes, which I am still actively working on. But here it was not to predict on the one hand, on the other hand there was nothing fatal here either, besides one of the team members is strong in DevOps, which simplifies control over the system.
Remember

Let's summarize. How to proceed to make a decision:

Make a list of criteria and requirements for work that are important for you. Sort them by priority and make sure that the position in the new company meets all these criteria.
Gather as much information as possible about the company and the environment in which you will have to work using various sources suggested in the article.
If necessary, negotiate again with a recruiter or a future manager to obtain missing information or agree on conditions.

Sergey Bronnikov ,
SpiceIT special correspondent