158 days from first contact to offer, AI and unicorn roles. Recruiters admit which specialists were the hardest to find this year and why

Not all projects on the market require such a deep understanding of the mechanisms of operation of complex systems of our scale, combined with proactivity and a desire to develop a product focused on the global market. That is why a longer selection cycle was strategically justified: it was important for us to find an engineer who thinks systematically, takes responsibility for technical decisions and is ready to influence the development of the industry along with the product.

As for the truly challenging jobs, this year we worked with roles that required a unique combination of technical depth and experience. Among them are AI Engineer and Quant Data Scientist in the Machine Learning Team. We all see how rapidly AI and Data are developing, and as a cutting-edge company we work at the edge of the current stack and modern engineering approaches. Accordingly, the complexity of these roles is due not only to the rapid evolution of technologies, but also to the limited number of specialists who have sufficient expertise to work with complex models and make technically sound decisions.

We have a strong starting point — a developed ML department, which sets a high bar for quality and forms a demanding candidate profile. At the same time, we focus on specialists who not only follow trends, but also have practical experience working with technologies that are now moving from the stage of formation to the status of new industry standards.

It is too early to draw conclusions about the speed or complexity of the hiring: these positions have only recently opened. But it is already clear that finding such experts is not an easy task. However, this is exactly the challenge we are ready for. We create an environment where complex tasks become the basis for strong decisions, and the professional development of a specialist has a tangible impact on both the product and the market.

But the biggest challenge, in my opinion, for us was hiring a mobile team in a very short time. There are two recruiters in the team, and at the end of August we received a request to hire a team of senior mobile specialists — proactive and technically strong. In addition, there was a clear deadline: all offers had to be made by the end of September. The situation was also complicated by the fact that I already had a two-week vacation planned for September. My colleague Yevgenia coped with this task very well: when I returned, most of her candidates were already in the final stages or with offers in hand. Now we are still looking for mobile developers, but without that crazy urgency.

In fact, every vacancy is a challenge: sometimes easier, sometimes more difficult. We do not work in a mass recruitment mode, but always look for specific specialists — «our» ones. But, in my opinion, all these efforts and the time spent are definitely worth it.

If we talk about the most difficult to close this year, these were:

• Full-stack Engineers (Ruby/JS). We were looking for very experienced specialists with a strong full-stack profile. Most candidates who felt good in the backend did not pass the frontend part at the level we needed. And our request was precisely for people who are equally confident in both directions and can fully close the tasks end-to-end.
• Customer Support RepresentativesThe difficulty here was not only in professionalism, but also in the specifics of the schedule. We are building 24/7 support and this year we hired in new locations for us, which should cover the necessary time zones. That is, we had to simultaneously converge in terms of the level of service and product skills, willingness to work within a certain schedule, and also in markets that we were only exploring for ourselves.
• Technical Content Writer. This is a «unicorn» role for us to some extent. The person must combine technical skills and a deep understanding of the topic with the ability to write clearly, structured and interestingly for different audiences. There are few such specialists on the market, and we value a very mature level. The longest hiring cycle this year also applies to these roles. The reason is the same: we were looking for a very precise match for the level of seniority, set of competencies and context of business tasks. Our approach — it is better to spend more time on the search than to compromise on quality — remains. This is a «long game», because it is important to us that the person really strengthens the team and the product.

A similar challenge awaited us with the Business Development Manager, although for a different reason. We didn’t need a classic sales person, but a BD partner who thinks in terms of funnels, creates revenue streams, is able to adapt quickly, and works according to the principle of «create a canvas — pass it on to the team.» This combination of the right mindset, flexibility, and entrepreneurial approach is very rare. In addition, strong candidates in this market are usually deeply immersed in long-term projects, so opening them up to dialogue is already half the battle.

The search for an SEO Team Lead was no less difficult. The SEO market is currently extremely overheated, and we needed an expert who simultaneously has management experience, deep technical expertise, and is able to work with large Tier-1 projects, analytics, budgets, complex strategies, and experiments. This is a very narrow segment, and most of these specialists already work in product companies and are not considering changes.

But the search for a Jira Specialist turned out to be difficult due to another specific feature — an extremely small market. While many candidates have general experience in administration or system analytics, very few have deep expertise in Jira, ScriptRunner, Groovy, integrations, REST API and migrations. In fact, there were isolated cases that met all the requirements.

As for the longest hiring cycle this year, the record was set by the Lead Marketing Analyst position — 158 days from first contact to offer. This role required a combination of technical analytics, product logic, and leadership skills. The candidate had to be able to build marketing analytics «from scratch,» influence decisions within the product, build complex dashboards, work with attribution, automate data pipelines, and at the same time have strong SQL, BigQuery, Python, statistics, and A/B testing. Such multidisciplinary nature significantly narrowed the pool of specialists and made this vacancy the longest in terms of closing time.

These cases once again confirmed that the higher the level of complexity of the role, the more important flexibility, personalized approach and deep understanding of the business context are. This is what allowed us to successfully close all the mentioned positions.

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