Strategies for Bukalapak, Goers, and Seekmi to Recruit "Engineers"

Talking about talent in the startup world is still a protracted problem. The low number and quality of Indonesian human resources in the field of technology development is not accompanied by the increasing number of local and foreign technology-based startups in the country.

We tried to talk to a number of local startup activists about how they react to this and what strategies they are taking to deal with it.

Lack of experience and skills of fresh graduate students

According to Seekmi CEO Clarissa Leung, one of the main reasons is the lack of experience and skills of IT graduates (Information Systems and Informatics Engineering) to fill engineer positions which are currently sought after by startups.

"I see only a small number of the best graduates from well-known universities in Indonesia who can immediately work according to the standards of recruiting startups. Some still need further training and training."

The problem of not maximizing the ability of IT graduates at this time, does not only occur in Indonesia. Based on her personal experience during a recent visit to Silicon Valley, Clarissa saw many young people who continue their studies to learn coding.

Another reason for the low number of engineers in Indonesia is that most students are IT graduates, preferring to work in multinational companies with higher salaries than working at startups or building their own startups. In the end, it is difficult for startups to find the best engineers to qualified CTOs.

Utilize internal recommendations and referral

Bukalapak as one of the largest marketplace services in Indonesia, carries out the process of recruiting engineer positions in a different way. Utilizing information from its own employees, Bukalapak is able to produce the desired engineer recommendations according to the criteria. According to Bukalapak's VP of Engineering Ibrahim Arief, this method is powerful enough to overcome the difficulty of finding new talents in the field of technology development.

"Seeing that the majority of qualified engineers who passed our selection came from referral  internal employees, we provide internal referral  a bonus of 20 million Rupiah for every engineer who passes."

To add to the existing options, Bukalapak also holds a variety of services Programming and competition application development with prizes of hundreds of millions of rupiah to attract talented Indonesian engineering talents.

This strategy was also carried out at Goers. According to Goers Co-Founder and COO Niki Tsuraya Yaumi, although it is often difficult to find suitable engineers, recruitment through referral from existing engineers is quite effective to do.

"When we did hiring, each candidate will meet a minimum of three people to be assessed."

In addition, Goers also makes job vacancies announcements at universities that have the potential for IT graduate students, collaborates with events on campus and internship program path to become a permanent employee.

"For Goers, looking for engineers is also a challenge, because we are looking not only in terms of skill only, but also from the side culturefit, said Niki.

Gradual recruitment utilizing social media accounts

Unlike Bukalapak and Goers, at Seekmi the recruitment process is more gradual and not open. By looking in detail at the education and work experience information, Clarissa said that Seekmi is still looking for recruitment, but not on a large scale. If at a certain time Clarissa and the team find an engineer who meets the criteria and is suitable for a certain position, the engineer will be immediately recruited without spreading job vacancies on the job listing.

"Seekmi doesn't always recruit engineers. From various channels, if there are engineers who... qualified, we will definitely recruit immediately, "

Clarissa added that the current lack of experience and informal education possessed by information technology graduate students still makes it difficult for startups to hire these new workers.

In the future, it is estimated that more Indonesian human resources in the field of technology development are needed. To be able to find qualified engineers, startups and related parties must of course be more aggressive in approaching, educating and awareness related to Information Technology so that they are more interested in becoming an engineer.

While those who do not have an IT educational background can take advantage of the class coding which is now widely available in Jakarta and other big cities.