4 mistakes when recruiting for cloud projects

A paper expert costs 84 thousand PLN

Most recruiters in the IT industry fall into the trap of certificates. They see an AWS Certified Solutions Architect logo and close the book on basic verification. However, our data from May 2024 shows a brutal truth: as many as 73.6% of candidates holding prestigious certificates could not solve a real latency problem in the eu-central-1 region during practical tests. A certificate only tells us that someone can memorize answers to test questions. It says nothing about whether this person will burn your company's budget in one weekend through a poorly configured autoscaling.

Hiring a theorist is not only an image error but primarily a financial one. The average cost of onboarding and three months' salary for a failed employee in a Senior Cloud Architect position in Krakow is currently about 92,400 PLN gross. On top of that is the cost of the team's wasted time, which must clean up after poor architectural decisions. At Mosty Zarządzania, we see that companies that focus on checking specific emergency scenarios instead of asking for definitions shorten recruitment time by 13 days and fire people 41% less often before the end of the probation period.

During technical verification, it's worth throwing the candidate into the deep end. Instead of asking what S3 is, ask about a specific situation: we have 14 terabytes of data that we must move between accounts in different regions at minimum data egress cost. If the candidate starts by drawing diagrams rather than calculating transfer costs, you have an engineer before you who might be expensive to maintain. A true practitioner will ask about the time they have for this operation and whether the data is encrypted with an external key, as that changes the migration approach.

A certificate confirms memory, not the ability to put out fires in infrastructure costing 40 thousand dollars a month.

Mixing roles, or the architect who only clicks

A common mistake made by IT company boards in Wroclaw is looking for a 'cloud person' without specifying whether they need an administrator or an architect. These are two different worlds. An administrator (Cloud Admin) ensures that everything works and is patched. An architect must design the system so the company doesn't go bankrupt during a sudden traffic spike. In the 19 projects we audited last year, confusing these roles extended the implementation time of critical modules by an average of 9.2 weeks. That's almost a three-month delay in delivering value to the end client.

The problem is that job advertisements are often copied from competitors without thought. We see lists of requirements where Terraform, Kubernetes, knowledge of GDPR regulations, and proficiency in Python stand side by side. This is not a job description; it's a wish list that scares away 86% of sensible candidates. Effective recruitment starts with an audit of the team's needs. If your dev team handles Docker on their own, you don't need another container spec. You need someone to handle networking and security at the VPC level, as that's where vulnerabilities most often lie.

At Mosty Zarządzania, we recommend dividing the process into specific competency stages. Instead of one long conversation about everything, we do two quick 47-minute meetings. The first is pure practice in the console, the second is a discussion about business logic. This division allows us to catch people who are technically great but completely do not understand why the company is building a given product. In cloud projects, a lack of business understanding results in infrastructure that is technically perfect but costs 4.7 times more than it should.

If the candidate doesn't know what S3 costs? Pass on them

FinOps is not just a buzzword; it's a necessity. In 2024, the cloud stopped being cheap and became predictable only for those who can count. If during recruitment a Senior candidate cannot estimate the monthly maintenance cost of an EKS cluster for 20 microservices, it means they are not a senior. In one Wroclaw software house we worked with, a lack of cost control by a new 'expert' led to burning 12,700 euros in just 18 days through unnecessary debug logging enablement in production.

When recruiting for Cloud IT, you must check cost awareness as strictly as knowledge of CLI. Ask for specific optimization examples. A good candidate will say: 'I saved my previous company 32% of RDS expenses by moving to Graviton instances and implementing old snapshot deletion policies'. This is concrete. Someone who only talks about 'scaling' and 'availability' usually doesn't look at the invoices at the end of the month. And those invoices in Azure projects can grow by 214% in a single quarter if no one manages them.

Teams that deliver results are those where the engineer feels responsible for the budget. That's why in the recruitment processes we run for our clients, we introduced a 'Design and Price' module. The candidate gets 15 minutes to sketch the architecture and 5 minutes to provide cost ranges. An error margin above 25% disqualifies the candidate for senior positions. It may sound harsh, but with infrastructure costing 50,000 PLN a month, a one-quarter error is 12,500 PLN thrown down the drain every month.

An engineer who doesn't look at costs is not a specialist; they are an expensive hobby for your company.

Ghost ads and 17-item wish lists

The final big mistake is the content of the ad itself. We analyzed 483 job offers from industry portals over the last 6 months. Those containing more than 12 required technologies had 64% fewer applications than specific ads. Companies are looking for 'unicorns' – people who know AWS, Azure, and GCP simultaneously, plus databases and preferably React frontend. This approach means the offer hangs on the portal for an average of 114 days, and the company loses money on paid ads and a lack of manpower.

Focusing on 3-4 key technologies that are actually used in the project dramatically improves the quality of the CVs coming in. If you are building a system on AWS, don't ask for Azure experience 'just in case'. An AWS specialist will quickly learn another cloud if needed, but looking for someone who already knows everything is a path to hiring someone who knows a bit about everything, which means nothing specific. In the IT industry in Wroclaw, competition for talent is too high for such mistakes.

At Mosty Zarządzania, we believe in KPIs tailored to code. If your goal is a database migration in 4 months, look for someone who has already done it at least twice, not someone with 11 years of general IT experience. Recruitment is a logistics process, not a movie casting. The faster you get to specifics like: 'we use Terraform to manage the network, we need someone to automate this process', the faster you'll fill the vacancy. The average time to close a Cloud recruitment for our clients is currently 23 business days.

How to check a candidate in 47 minutes?

To shorten the process and not tire people out, we implemented our own screening method. It consists of three stages that fit into less than an hour. The first 10 minutes are a logic verification: we ask to explain how the candidate approaches the problem of lost connectivity between a database and an application. The next 25 minutes are a 'live debug' – the candidate gets access to a misconfigured test environment and has to find 3 specific errors. The final 12 minutes are a conversation about money and work culture. This is enough to make a decision about moving to the final.

This method allowed us to sift out 92% of theorists right at the start. Interestingly, the best candidates praise this model highly because they don't have to go through five stages of HR interviews where they are asked 'where they see themselves in five years'. In IT, facts matter. If a candidate sees that you respect their time and check real skills, they will more likely choose your offer over a corporation that grinds them through processes for two months. HR without the fluff is the basis for building cloud teams that actually deliver results.

Finally, remember: you are not looking for perfection; you are looking for a fit. If a project is to last 11 months and primarily involves cost optimization, don't take a visionary who wants to rewrite everything from scratch in a new technology. Take a craftsman who likes cleaning logs and optimizing queries. At Mosty Zarządzania, we help set these criteria so you don't have to repeat the recruitment in six months. The effectiveness of our personnel implementations in 2024 was 96.8% – that's how many people stayed with the companies after the probation period.