In recent years I’ve been reading quite a lot about hiring specialists, and I find it interesting to look at the topic from both sides. I interview candidates myself, and I’m constantly trying to get better at it. At the same time, when reading books about hiring, I always try to recall how I was interviewed, how I behaved as a candidate, and what I liked or disliked about the people doing the hiring.
About a year ago, Alpina released a new book on IT recruitment. I wasn’t familiar with the author, Egor Yatsenko, but the reviews were generally quite positive, so it would have been a shame not to pick it up.
With this kind of literature, though, it’s always important to understand the qualifications of the “trainer.” Egor Yatsenko is the co-founder of the recruitment agency Wanted: Profi, which specializes in hiring for the IT sector. In addition, he’s well known as a frequent speaker at various industry conferences, regularly giving talks, and he’s also involved in teaching sourcing (a professional term that essentially means targeted candidate search across different platforms).
“Fair enough,” I said to myself, bought the book, and started reading. And, to be honest, already in the very first pages I began to have doubts. Jumping ahead a bit — the book did not meet my expectations at all, and my overall rating is very low. Still, I’ll explain why, and also point out what it does well.
In the very first sentence, the author states that the book “is intended both for beginners and for already actively working HR specialists in the IT market.” However, almost immediately afterward he switches to talking specifically about IT recruiters. I understand that one could say I’m nitpicking over wording, but HR (Human Resources) and recruitment, while they often go hand in hand in many companies, are in fact very different in terms of both responsibilities and required skills. And it seems to me that an experienced professional shouldn’t create this kind of confusion right from the start.
Especially since the rest of the book is entirely about the hiring process. The final stage described is the candidate’s first day on the job — at most their first few days in the company. Yes, that’s usually where a recruiter’s work largely ends, but for HR it’s essentially just the beginning. Still, let’s forgive the author this small inaccuracy.
Alright — but what exactly is he going to teach beginners (and not-so-beginners) in hiring? It turns out: everything. Starting from the absolute basics. So the author is being a bit disingenuous when he says the book is also for people who are already working in the field. Practitioners usually don’t need to be told what “this whole IT thing” even is, or where you’re supposed to look for specialists. They also don’t need a definition of sourcing or a step-by-step walkthrough of how to move a candidate through the pipeline from start to finish. If someone has been hiring in your company for a long time and still doesn’t know these fundamentals — I’m afraid I have bad news for you.
As for true beginners who haven’t even heard of IT, there’s a lot to teach them. The material is divided into several sections.
In the section “Introduction to IT Recruitment,” he covers the industry itself, the specifics of hiring for this domain, and how to take a vacancy into work — meaning how to build the profile of the ideal future candidate. It’s described in fairly detailed, step-by-step form.
In the second section, the author goes deeper into IT as a field. What roles exist, what technologies and methodologies are used, how development is generally organized, and what terminology is common. The purpose is to help you at least understand what people want from you — and to be able, more or less, to speak the same language as the team and potential candidates. There’s a lot here, but it’s all very high-level.
Overall, this kind of distilled overview of the most basic knowledge can be useful if a person has never had any exposure to the software development industry at all. But like any surface-level information, this material carries plenty of risks. Because, as we know, the devil is always in the details. Having a general understanding is fine, but to truly understand candidates and speak their language, time and hands-on experience are required.
From my perspective, the least useful part of this section is the attempt to give a high-level rundown of all the main IT roles. It’s simply not enough to learn that a QA team includes manual testing and automated testing, each described in a couple of paragraphs. If a recruiter is tasked with finding strong QA specialists, they’ll have to dive into the subject headfirst. And it’s very unlikely they’ll be allowed to do this on their own right away — at first, they’ll be taken to interviews by the hand, taught through real examples. Only gradually will they be brought into independent work, once they fully understand the specifics of the company they’re hiring for and who exactly that company needs.
Trying to explain programming languages to a recruiter is a thankless task in itself. Especially since even in this very “trimmed-down” form, the author doesn’t cover the full diversity anyway, focusing mostly on web and mobile development (apparently reflecting his own background), while leaving everything else on the sidelines. And explanations of programming languages for non-programmers written by a non-programmer — sorry, but that just makes me smile. Not because it’s incorrect, no. But because the obvious question is: why? I genuinely don’t understand how this kind of description is supposed to help a recruiter, or why they would need to know it at all. If you’re assessing a technical specialist, the technical interview will always be conducted by a strong engineer — not by a recruiter. Always.
The next section is entirely devoted to sourcing. And this is probably the most useful part of the book. It focuses on methods that help narrow the search funnel and find the right candidates. Yes, there’s a lot of repetition, and many recommendations are tied to specific tools and their current behavior (which, of course, can change tomorrow). But this is genuinely something a junior recruiter needs to know and be able to do. It’s about how to think in order to come up with non-obvious search approaches. That said, in some teams today this responsibility is even split: sourcers handle the active search, while recruiters build the initial candidate profile and then handle outreach and interviews. And I’d argue that a slightly more experienced specialist should already be comfortable with sourcing anyway. Which again brings us back to the same conclusion: this material is really aimed at beginners.
The fourth section covers the interview itself. And it’s so skimpy that there’s barely anything to discuss. Just a few pages with the most superficial — and therefore largely useless — information. Which is especially disappointing, considering that the interview is one of the most critical stages of the hiring process.
Even the following section, titled “Candidate Processing,” is described in greater detail, though it also raises plenty of questions. Communication at the offer stage and during onboarding is no less important. Many truly strong candidates make their final decision based, in part, on how the company interacts with them at this point. And even after an offer is accepted, there’s still the probation period — which is never just about “the company evaluating the new hire.” The candidate is evaluating the company as well. And they may very well leave if they don’t like what they see.
So, as I said above, the title and positioning of the book are misleading. This book will not help you hire top specialists — there’s simply too little substance in it for that. You can’t turn someone into a good recruiter based on this material. At best, it might produce a junior assistant in a hiring team — someone who needs close supervision, can’t be trusted with anything serious yet, but could potentially be grown into a competent specialist. Though some unnecessary and inaccurate ideas would first need to be unlearned.
Yes, there is useful knowledge here that could be given to a beginner sourcer. But expecting that, after reading this book, a person could go out and start hiring “the best IT specialists” is nonsense. If I had to train newcomers for that purpose, I would extract the sourcing section from the book, cut out the repetitions and filler, and then build the rest of the training from a completely different angle — focusing on what actually matters in hiring, how to assess it, and where to read more in depth about those aspects.
And if you really want to understand how to hire IT professionals, I highly recommend To Hire or Not to Hire? by Konstantin Borisov.
My rating: 2/5
