Even in peacetime, IT recruiters had to go out of their way to find and hire new developers. With the beginning of a full-scale war in Ukraine, this task became even more difficult. Our recruiter and HR Manager, Nadiya Rakovska, shares her own experience in this blog. She tells in detail about how to recruit during the war and gives tips, thanks to which our company was able to reduce the employee recruitment cycle by three times.

In the first two weeks of the full-scale war, we were all scared for our lives and became “frozen”, not understanding how to be and what to do next. We did not know what it was like to live during the war. There were many questions that no one could answer clearly: whether recruiting in IT will be relevant, whether people still will be looking for jobs, and whether there will be work at all…

So when I heard that management was not planning to stop hiring, I was against it. It seemed to me that during the war, people think foremost about their lives, and only lastly about work. I was afraid to even think about writing to the candidates because my letter might be just untimely and inappropriate. However, at some point, I decided to look at the situation from the side not of fear, but of opportunities. And then the new decisions came.

How we hired employees: under the sound of sirens and from bomb shelters

We decided to start with candidates who were “in active search“: someone who lost his job due to destroyed offices, someone who previously worked for russian or belarusian companies, or someone who was planning to change jobs even before the war. I also carefully updated information on the candidates we were scheduling the interviews with before, but never had a chance to make them.

The next step was to move on to “passive” candidates. It is important to note that attempts to communicate with them were very careful. After all, we did not know where and under what conditions the person was, whether it was appropriate to write to him and what the reaction would be.

Then we decided to expand the geography of the search for candidates. Our efforts were facilitated by the fact that many Europeans now admire the steadfastness and determination of our people, and they would love to become part of the Ukrainian team.

I had great respect and admiration for the developers who went to defend the country. They spoke briefly about it in response to my messages. They are the pride of our country and we will be very much looking forward to their return after victory.

I had to conduct several interviews at my own bomb shelter. Thankfully, we have a dental office with Wi-Fi above it There were also interviews when I could hear the sound of a siren through the phone.

As a result, we were able to hire 10 candidates in a few months. Before the start of the war, we had 20 people on our team, now we have 30. That is, we managed to increase the speed of hiring employees by three times because usually the process of hiring one Unity developer takes two months.

Communication with candidates has also changed. Every interview now begins with questions about whether the person and his family are safe now. Sometimes you have to hear stories, after which you want to hug the candidate and ask nothing more. But we will overcome all difficulties and become even better. We will manage because our people cannot be broken.

Tips for successful recruitment of IT specialists

It should be taken to account that in IT and game development, in particular, everyone is pursuing interesting projects. Therefore, the goal is to discuss the project the candidate will work on, why it is interesting and important and what’s its mission. By giving candidates the opportunity to choose a project that is more interesting to them (if you have several), you will get an even bigger plus in your favour.

The basic advantages of the IT sphere, such as remote work and competitive salary, are no longer surprising. But candidates will appreciate the stability your company can provide employees during this extremely difficult time. Be sure to be one of the first to discuss this topic.

Use your media and social networks to communicate your story, values, and culture. If one of the candidates has already managed to use your product or play your game, this will definitely increase their loyalty to you. And if they read a fantastic interview with your CEO or developers, it will help them fall in love with your team even before they meet.

In IT recruiting, even in peacetime, the speed of the company’s decision to work with the candidate plays a decisive role. Especially in wartime, try not to drag out the selection process – if possible, reduce the number of interview stages and provide feedback over several days.

Whether you’re in a bomb shelter or your home office, try to create a friendly atmosphere during the interview. The conversation should not resemble an exam, but a discussion of technical topics, an exchange of experience. Thanks to this communication, the candidate should feel with which people, in which atmosphere he will work in the future.

I wish you to stay safe and take care, I hope those few tips and our experience can help your company grow even in those tremendously difficult times.

The post Recruitment during the war appeared first on KAPPS.

Working on the Nunu Spirits was always multifaceted and interesting. We always believe that a developer must be passionate about the life of the project, from the very beginning to the very end. This is not just about writing code or having excitement about the graphical component but also about interacting with each other.

This was our case with the Slovakian team on the Nunu Spirits project. We were lucky to work with them, as it was a constant pleasure, no matter all challenges we’ve faced. We have never met such enthusiastic, responsible, kind, and down-to-Earth people at the same time.

What’s Nunu Spirits?

Before we go to our personal experience on the project, we’d love to describe it to you. With the help of Nunu, which is a whole fantasy world, you can plant trees by playing a game. Players collect and earn 3D NFTs called Nunus, where every Nunu has the chance to become a real tree, planted in the real world.

This is how the Nunu Spirits merges the joy of casual gaming and the earning capacity of blockchain and turns it into ecological action. This was a very exciting and innovative project to work on. Making a game with reforesting initiatives around the world was also something we felt is very important, especially from now on.

Interpersonal connections

To start describing our connection with the team, it was based on the same values and very matching energy. Our calls would show this mutual understanding between the two companies at their best. All discussions of the project on average had been taken no more than half an hour a week! This shows how fast and easy our communication flow was.

In addition, what made us respect Nunu Spirits so much is their concern about the war in Ukraine. They sincerely asked each developer on our team about their personal situation, were willing to help anytime, and if some breaks in the Internet connection were seen they were patient like no one else.

Technical tasks

Speaking about the technical tasks, our team was responsible for creating a prototype, which later grew into a full-fledged game. We were also writing a level Generator tool to fully create, edit and update the game world.

Another major things we’re proud to create for Nunu Spirits are animations. It was a great success because we had a complete understanding of what exactly the team wanted to get in the final looks of models in the game.

The result

Thus, we put a huge part of our soul into the gameplay, from the basic things (like the form of character control) to the revitalization of the game world. This Nunu Universe will make people delighted for sure people. And at the same time, it makes us proud of the effort we’ve put into creating it and the result we’ve got.

Nunu’s team feedback

“We were really glad to have the opportunity to cooperate with the whole KAPPS team. Even in this difficult situation, they were always able to provide professional, high-quality services. Our cooperation was very fruitful, and we hope to have a chance to work together on more projects in the future”, says Marek Bartovic, Nunu Spirits Game Producer.

The post Nunu Spirits x KAPPS appeared first on KAPPS.

Successful start

There are two ways to create games or applications in Unity. You can write all the code yourself, which is very long and difficult. Or you can use ready-made plugins. These are packages with a set of development, design and other tools that you can just download and straight forward use in the game. Those plugins help to use all the parts of the project as playing with a constructor.

To simplify the development process, Unity created its own Asset Store (as an analogy of the App Store for iPhone), where developers posted and sold their plugins so others would not waste time and use ready-made solutions for their tasks.

At the same time, my colleagues from the KAPPS team and me started developing such plugins for Unity. We are developers. This means that no one but us better understands how to create products that will make developer’s life easier.

Our plugins really made us well-known around the community. Soon, we became one of the top 5 teams by downloading at the global Asset Store. The most popular of our plugins are Ultimate Mobile Pro, iOS Native Pro, Android Native Pro.

Therefore, the support of the Asset Store recommended us for Unity users itself. Because of this, such famous companies as Moon Studios and OneSignal asked us to help with their development. And we successfully work with them to this day.

But just as in every good story, right when we became popular among Unity users, we made one of the biggest failures in our career.

Loss of control and money

We started working on plugins as soon as they appeared in Unity. Back than we didn’t have that much of a experience, so we thought we were doing everything right. But at some point, the process started to snowball. And here’s why.

The creation of the plugins looks like this:

• you create plugins and upload them to the store;
• other developers download and use them;
• if something does not work, they write reviews or requests to fix it.

Everything here is just like in any other service: you get feedback and start doing everything to improve the situation. So we have been releasing new plugins and at the same time have been fixing everything that users asked us about.

Meanwhile, the competition and the demands of our audience were growing. We were shown a problem – we solved it, we were given a request – we fixed it. But again due to lack of experience, it had turned out that our plugin architecture was really bad. We worked fast and tried to quickly deliver fixed products, but forgot about the quality of the original code.

At that time, we launched twelve plugins for general use, which we were “renewing” all the time. It took a lot of effort, and, of course, money. And we realized two things:

• Fixing all the problems people complain about is unrealistic. It’s easier to just rewrite everything.
• The financial costs of supporting and developing the project went beyond what we have earned at the Asset Store.

Basically we had earned $ 5-7k a month from plugins sales. And exactly the same amount was paid to developers to fix bugs. This is an perfect example how bad code and bad architecture “killed” a really good product – our plugins. We did not cover the cost of product development. And it could not go on like this.

Difficult decision

So we made a very difficult decision. We stopped the current developing processes. We took a break, removed all our old plugins from the Asset Store and started writing new ones. It all took about a year. Every day we were writing new products from scratch. But this time it was different: it was a clean code and good architecture.

Product quality

The effect was amazing. After we rewrote the products, it became 10 times cheaper to maintain them! Whereas in the beginning our developers spent days fixing problems, now it takes several hours a week.

Previously, plugin support cost us $ 7-10k, but now it costs only $ 800. After this incident, we have learned forever that the correct architecture, clean and well-thought-out code will help us to develop the product way easier, cheaper and better. This principle applies to any job, project, or career.

Always put quality first. Then you do not have to redo the work and spend money on fixing errors that could have been avoided and therefore there would be no need to risk your reputation.

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