As this week we wanted to shine some light on Technical Recruitment in the online gaming/betting industry we have reached out to Ana Borges from Betsson Group to pick her brain on various challenges she faces on a daily basis.
Below you can find some of the thoughts she has shared with us. As always Ana, it´s great catching up with you.. Obrigado!
You are currently working as a Recruitment Researcher at Betsson Group in Stockholm. What are the main challenges you are facing when it comes to hiring Technical Talent?
Successful tech company numbers have been increasing in the past few years, not only in Stockholm but also in our other locations and talent isn’t always available locally to supply demand. More often than not, this means searching outside, which complicates and lengthens the process in both ends. I also recruit for our offices in Malta and Tallinn which becomes more challenging, both in understanding the needs of the teams as well as articulating and presenting the mission back to candidates.
I know you are working hard searching for .NET developers, what makes this search so difficult?
Competition has increased a lot lately and companies end up chasing the same people over and over. As demand rises, we need to be spending a significant amount of resources attracting them, raising awareness to the fact that we are constantly innovating and working on various high level technical challenges. The biggest obstacle these days is that supply is lower than demand and so we notice that more .NET developers are becoming consultants and freelancers in order to raise their salaries, given the risk for them is reduced due the high demand for professionals.
The Engineering team at Betsson Group is distributed over various locations in Europe, how do they collaborate in an efficient way?
Betsson is organised in a way that fosters knowledge sharing and communication, so it’s common for our developers to travel and visit other offices. Project overlap across locations is inevitable and so tools such as Skype and Slack have a huge presence through out the day, some teams even have a permanent Video Conference across locations allowing them to be closer to each other and keep a direct line of communication at all times. We are heavily focused on Agile development so collaboration is really important, teams set clear expectations from each others and share ownership over their areas.
What makes working on the online gambling industry appealing in your opinion?
The complexity of the business, it’s high transactions environment and the fact that things change extremely fast. The adoption of new tools and technologies also proves to be a great selling point for candidates.
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