Where should an international company hire: an insider’s view

We were about to post another article about how great and irreplaceable our software is (simply because it’s truly so), but we’ve got an e-mail from our good old friend who has been inspiring us for years. Diana is the Head of the Development Center in an IT-company. She was going to leave some kind of a basic feedback (like “The product is awesome, the support is great, thank you”) and simply continue using LanteriaHR quietly. But fortunately, we could explain to her how lazy and irresponsible this is helpful her feedback could be for those struggling to choose an appropriate Human Resources Management Software. Jokes aside, we are grateful to the Customer (who wished to remain anonymous), for the time he spent with us and for her extensive answers.

L: Hi! I know you have an inspiringly positive experience with our software. We hope to learn more about it. Could you tell us about the challenges you’ve faced?

C: We have offices in many countries, but our main workforce is located in US, Germany, Russia and Slovakia. The wages are different for these offices so when we faced the need to hire a dozen of new developers our expenses could differ greatly depending on our choice. But hiring people based on this indicator only would have been a mistake too as the efficiency matters even more.

L: So it appears that you’ve used the data from LanteriaHR and made a decision?

C: It’s not just mere data. Our employees are behind these numbers. We don’t need any additional software to see how much people earn in every office. But when it comes to efficiency, even to ROI - an Excel sheet is not enough. So we used LanteriaHR, a web based HR software. That gave us a totally different perspective. It turned out that newcomers spend different amount of time as trainees in different offices.

That is to say, if we had to hire new people at the lowest cost possible, our first guess would be to hire more developers in our Kazan office in Russia. But it turned out that on average the newcomers spend the longest time in trainee status there, and the staff turnover is also much more significant there.

L: Why do you think this was the case? Have you analyzed the reasons?

C: There could be a number of reasons. But it turned out that the senior developers in our Bratislava office are more capable of coaching the newcomers. When a new person joins the team it’s not easy to be effective right away. Even when we hire an experienced developer it doesn’t mean anything, he or she would spend weeks getting to know the business from the inside. But in our Slovakian office they become efficient and productive faster, and thus we start making money sooner.

L: Is it like LanteriaHR saved you hundreds of thousands of dollars?

C: (laughs) Sorry, I’m not entitled to disclose this sort of information. But certainly, let’s say we’ve saved some financial resources thanks to this HR software system.

L: Thank you for your time.

C: My pleasure.

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