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Popular countries for finding candidates for IT roles are Ukraine, Poland and other countries of Eastern and Central Europe. But other locations are also developing, such as Portugal.

One of our clients, with whom we worked on a vacancies in Ukraine, decided to form a team in Portugal and we had the opportunity to gain experience in the search in this country.

We were looking for the following vacancies:

• Senior NodeJS Engineer 
• Senior React Engineer 
• Lead Fullstack Engineer 
• QA Engineer 

In this case study, we will try to describe the peculiarities of recruitment in Portugal.

Salaries in Portugal 

According to official data, the average salary in Portugal is much lower than in many other European countries, and this becomes a frequent reason for allocating a low budget for the search for specialists. 

However, experienced candidates who have acquired good skills, worked in the European market and gained the necessary experience expect higher remuneration.

I would like to quote one of the candidates which we interviewed:

"Salaries in our country are quite low, so we started looking for companies in other European countries. I don't understand why I will be paid half as much for doing the same work."

Professional level

One of the main branches of the Portuguese economy is tourism and hospitality due to the favorable climate. Of course, the direction of technologies is also developing in this country, but we noticed certain differences in the experience of specialists compared to candidates from Ukraine.

First of all, cross-functionality, if Ukrainian IT specialists develop more widely in various directions, then the Portuguese mostly choose a certain narrow field in which they continue their development.

For example, if our specialists can work with different technologies, deal with both backend and frontend (in different proportions), know several programming languages and be quite multifunctional, then when talking with the Portuguese, it is often noticeable that they stick to one direction.

According to our observations, there is a smaller selection of IT specialists in Portugal and their professional level is on average lower than that of Ukrainian developers with the same number of years of experience. Sometimes we recommended candidates to the client who had the title Senior, but in the technical interview the candidates could not answer the basic questions.

A tendency to change jobs quickly

If you look at the resumes of Portuguese candidates, you can see that many change companies frequently. Often it is less than a year in one company, or even 3-4 months.

In addition, work on freelance platforms is common.

There is also less dynamism and speed of hiring, a slowdown in scheduling interviews, when you have to wait several days for an answer regarding availability for an interview.

Level of English

The Portuguese understand very well that payment for their work depends, among other things, on the knowledge of the English language, so many specialists speak English at a sufficient level to be able to work in foreign companies.

At the same time, it should be understood that an experienced specialist with a high level of command of English also has corresponding salary expectations.