Written by
Todor Ranchev
Co-Founder & CEO
Interviews
Interview with Izabela Dimitrova, Senior Technical Recruiter at TechPods
Interview with Izabela Dimitrova, Senior Technical Recruiter at TechPods, about the changes in the IT job market after the emergence of ChatGPT, the trends in the demand for programmers in Bulgaria and the key differences between junior and senior specialists.
Izabela Dimitrova is a Senior Technical Recruiter at TechPods, where she strives to support the development of IT professionals by helping them find the best career opportunities that match their professional goals. A philosophy graduate, she has a strong code of ethics and a belief in the principles of transparency and fairness. With a proven track record in recruiting talent and building diverse and cohesive teams, Isabella excels in an approach that combines efficiency with a personal touch and attention to the needs of both employer and candidate. It is important for her to provide candidates with respect and personal attention, focusing on honesty and cooperation. She is also inspired by topics such as ethics, talent retention and employee well-being that play a key role in her career path.
What methods and tools do you use to discover talent in the IT sector? Do you have experience using automated pre-screening tools like TalentSight?
Our Recruiting team at TechPods most often does social sourcing, which is our primary means of successfully discovering, attracting and hiring IT talent. The positive image that we have built as a company over the years also gives quite a good result. It has a major impact on the amount of active applications from our job postings posted on various career sites. We also strongly believe in the power of referral programs, and my experience at TechPods has shown that the majority of our peer referrals have been a perfect fit from a cultural and technical perspective, leading to a more efficient process. In our daily life, we use various automated recruitment methods that help us in talent selection, such as Recruit'em for X-Ray Search and hirEZ for Boolean Search.
What are the most important qualities that distinguish a Senior from a Junior in the sector?
One of the most distinctive and important qualities that a senior programmer possesses in contrast to a novice programmer is precisely the in-depth technical skills and extensive experience in multiple technologies and programming languages that allow him to solve complex technical problems independently, applying the best practices in the industry. The novice professional most often has basic knowledge and experience with less technology, which quite naturally also creates the need for guidance from a more senior specialist when solving more complex problems.
From the point of view of personal qualities, the senior programmer is significantly more confident and independent in making important technical decisions. This, of course, is based on the experience he has gained over the years. Junior professionals, for example, tend to perform specific assigned tasks and often do not consider everything related to the product or its long-term goals beyond their tasks, which for senior IT professionals intuitively manifests as strategic thinking, which is extremely important for the future of the product and the development of the company.
How do you think new technologies will affect the IT talent recruitment process?
To date, technology has greatly optimized the role of recruiters and HR professionals in the IT industry, and I believe that as they gradually develop and integrate into our daily responsibilities, they will further speed up and automate the talent acquisition process, and I believe they will also discover many development opportunities. Although many colleagues in the recruitment and HR industry fear that the development of technology and its integration into our work will lead to the disappearance of our profession, I do not think that our role is limited to our routine duties such as screening, sourcing, interviewing, etc.
A valuable quality of recruiters that could not be replaced by artificial intelligence is creativity in communication. It allows us to convey our message to our target group of candidates in order to get the most out of each of the parties. This, in my opinion, would be difficult to automate, since the human has a key role in situations with people who are always different, and creativity is always needed to reach a desired result. This type of communication also builds valuable long-term relationships, builds trust and above all conveys emotion, which is important for each person when making a decision about their future.
Final: What features or enhancements would you recommend we add to our TalentSight platform? :)
As I've already shared, social media sourcing is a key method for successfully recruiting and hiring talent in any IT company. The more accurate the results against the various KPI metrics for technical roles, the faster and more efficient the TalentSight platform will be. For me, as someone whose work goes through LinkedIn a fair percentage of the time, for example, it would be interesting to use a feature that allows for larger-scale talent sourcing across other social networks as well, then aggregating the results. This would significantly reduce the time I would spend on the sourcing process, while at the same time allowing me to be more productive and quicker to get in touch with people who fit the criteria for the particular IT role.