How IT companies can build strong teams and retain specialists

Svetlana Arynova, Project Manager at MetaHR, Executive Search and Team Management Expert, Business Psychologist

About Me

By my initial education and background, I am a manager. I have worked in management for many years, leading teams, including in the role of CEO. Early in my career, I joined international companies where I was drawn to their systematic approach and democratic management style.

At some point, I realized that regulations, KPIs, and technologies are important but insufficient for successful management. In real life, everything comes down to people. Therefore, it was important for me to understand their motivation, fears, and how to best interact with them.

I obtained an MBA degree, trained in coaching tools, and began studying business psychology to understand why strong specialists burn out and why top managers fail to collaborate effectively.

As a result, my experience evolved into people management consulting, career coaching, and executive search. Currently, I work at MetaHR. We help businesses not just fill vacancies, but also assess project risks, psychological fit within the team, and the value added to the business.

Main Pain Points for IT Companies During Hiring

The IT sector is the most dynamic and demanding client. When IT company managers come to us with a request like “We urgently need a senior or head of engineering,” there are almost always three classic pain points hidden behind it.

The first is the search for a “purple squirrel” or unicorn, where a single job description tries to pack in an architect, a strong developer, a team lead, and ideal skills, but with a budget that doesn’t match. Therefore, we help clarify what specific task needs to be solved and who is truly needed for it.

The second is the problem of onboarding a new team member. A person passes hard-skill tests, starts working, and leaves on their own or is rejected by the team after three months. The cause is often not hard skills, but errors in assessing soft skills, motivation, or cultural fit.

The third pain point is hiring in “firefighting” mode, when a key player leaves the team or a new project phase begins, and there is no talent pipeline.

This doesn’t work in IT. Strong candidates are not sitting on the open job market. They need to be headhunted, engaged in dialogue, and sold on business tasks, not just salary ranges. Our task at MetaHR is to transition hiring from chaotic firefighting to a clear and predictable system.

Why Managers Hire Convenient Candidates

If we identify one main psychological mistake made by many managers, it is hiring based on the “narcissistic mirror” principle. Unconsciously, a manager looks for someone who resembles them: in thinking style, temperament, and communication manner. In practice, a project often needs someone with the opposite psychotype.

There are two psychological reasons for this. The first is the fear of losing control and authority. A strong, mature expert asks uncomfortable questions, highlights problems, and demands resources. Managers need to learn how to negotiate with such candidates. A “convenient” candidate will agree and create an illusion of order, but will deliver only average results at best.

The second reason is saving mental energy. IT managers are often in a state of chronic stress, and the brain unconsciously chooses the least energy-intensive option. A comfortable interview does not equal effective work.

At MetaHR, we eliminate subjective evaluation (“like” or “dislike”), formulate requirements, and create a profile of the ideal candidate. We assess a person based on their ability to solve a specific business problem.

How to Assess Soft Skills and Leadership Potential

Managers are used to assessing hard skills: they check qualifications, give a test task, and review the result. However, employee turnover is more often related to soft skills and behavior than professional skills. To reduce the influence of first impressions, you can use questionnaires. For example, we use TalentQ. They allow you to assess levels of responsibility, attitude toward rules, decision-making style, and reaction to stress.

Many things can also be assessed during interviews. For example: “Please tell me about a project that failed or was delayed. Why did this happen?” An immature candidate will look for reasons in external factors. A mature professional will note issues with requirements but also acknowledge their own responsibility, such as failing to flag risks in time.

It is also worth paying attention to how a person speaks about former colleagues and companies. Passive cynicism or devaluation can manifest in the new team as well.

To see the leadership potential of developers, we look at internal maturity: orientation toward results, willingness to take responsibility, and authority as an expert. Introverts often become leaders not through charisma, but through expertise. If a specialist was approached for mentoring at their previous workplace, this can be an indicator of readiness for a tech lead role.

How to Attract Strong IT Specialists

Competing with giants or international corporations solely with a “checkbook” is a losing battle from the start. If a specialist joins you only for the salary, they will leave you just as quickly. In IT, people often join not for an abstract brand, but for a person. If the founder is a strong expert from whom much can be learned, this sometimes outweighs corporate perks.

Beyond the leader’s personality, speed, autonomy, and lack of bureaucracy are important for strong specialists. If a candidate can directly influence the product and their ideas quickly reach production, this can become a powerful factor.

Also important are the scale of the challenge, transparent tasks, flexibility, and evaluating people by results rather than hours logged.

There is no need to try to compete with BigTech on their own turf. Sell the complexity of engineering tasks, the level of freedom, the speed of decision-making, and access to leadership.

How to Understand if an Employee Will Fit into the Team

When a person with an ideal resume starts working, but after a couple of months it turns out that the team hasn’t accepted them or they are leaving themselves, the problem may lie in the assessment of compatibility. During the hiring stage, it is important to understand in advance how well a person will fit into the team.

At MetaHR, we use TalentQ assessment tools, specifically the Dimensions personality questionnaire. It allows you to see communication style, attitude toward change, level of stress resistance, and how a person makes decisions. We overlay this profile on the psychotype of the existing team and identify zones of potential conflict or synergy.

You can also organize Team Fit interviews — informal working sessions with finalists and key developers. You can give them a hypothetical case, such as a missed deadline situation. This allows you to see if the candidate listens to others, how they argue their position, and whether there is basic human rapport between them.

I share a real case from practice. A technical company needed a strong technical director with a facilitating, partnership-style leadership approach. We arranged a meeting between the candidate and the technical team even before making an offer and implemented a 30-day observation period.

During the first month, the new leader immersed himself in processes, held individual meetings, listened to colleagues’ suggestions, and conducted workshops. When he began proposing changes, the team perceived them not as orders from above, but as solutions to their own problems.

The main conclusion is that fit is 50% dependent on the correct choice of person during hiring and 50% on proper onboarding. Do not throw a new leader into the team as a savior. Give them time to become “one of their own.”

Counteroffers and Employee Retention

When a key employee says, “I was offered 50% more elsewhere, I’m leaving,” a manager feels the urge to urgently beat the offer with money.

Money is almost never the root cause of the desire to leave. A person may be burned out, see no growth prospects, experience conflict with management, or be dissatisfied with the team. Raising the salary might just put a band-aid on a deep-seated problem.

A correct reaction begins with an emotional pause. The next step can be a stay-interview, i.e., a heart-to-heart conversation. It is important to find out what has stopped motivating the employee and what problems are bothering them.

If a person has hit a ceiling or is bored with routine, you can reconsider not only income but also the role: offer new tasks, expand the area of responsibility, give a new project, or mentoring opportunities.

Main Advice for Founders and IT Directors

If we reduce everything to one main step to start with — it is to stop treating hiring as filling gaps and emergency firefighting. When hiring is treated as buying hands on the market, companies get chaos, high turnover, and team burnout. Strong teams are always the result of strategy.

My main advice to an IT director or founder is to start with yourself. You need to conduct an honest audit of your own management style and determine what culture the leader is actually building: a culture of trust and results, or a culture of control and convenient people.

It is also important to define what kind of person the project needs right now. Not an abstract superhero, but a profile tailored to a specific business task. Another important aspect is the leader’s own willingness to grow alongside the strong specialists they want to attract.

Hiring is not just forwarding resumes and checking tech stacks. It is finding synergy between business tasks and personal values. If you shift the focus from searching for a specific developer to building a system where strong specialists will want to come, recruitment problems can be solved more effectively.