Behind Boolean Search: How Gestalt Changes IT Recruitment

I often hear that recruitment is boring, easy, that anyone can do it, and that formal qualifications in this field are completely irrelevant.

As someone coming from the psychological-psychotherapeutic sphere, I will never be able to agree with that.

In recruitment, just like in any other job, it's not enough to just "be nice to people" and know how to spot talent simply because you have good intuition.

IT recruitment is complex for a beginner and objectively harder than in other industries.

Technologies, languages, tools, and system architectures are completely foreign to most people outside the industry.

That's why a high-quality recruiter onboarding requires a strong grasp of terminology and business context, and only then of the products themselves.

It is not enough to know that Spring goes with Java; type Java AND Spring into a Boolean search, and wave shortlists around.

Technical Knowledge Is Just the Baseline

When a professional recruiter looks at a CV, they must see the bigger picture of professional experience and understand why the product itself and its setup require specific people:

• What kind of architecture did these people build?
• Do they work in the Cloud?
• Does their position include elements of DevOps, and why do the product and its setup demand that?

We must know exactly what belongs where.

When a hiring manager asks for a Java React Full Stack Engineer with experience in CI/CD and ETL, we cannot send them a full-stack Java developer who has spent years developing a banking desktop platform.

Likewise, if a project involves developing software that controls a physical robot, we must immediately eliminate candidates who insist exclusively on full-remote work.

A recruiter's job is to understand why this matters and make selections based on that.

However, for me, this is just the basic, technical entry point without which this job cannot be done at all.

A recruiter’s real work begins where technology ends - in the deep assessment of the person before the CV is even sent to the client.

How Gestalt Became My Market Survival Tool

Since I was fortunate enough to enrol in psychotherapeutic training right after university and start practising psychotherapy, I realised that this knowledge could greatly assist me in my daily work.

I admit, this didn’t stem from some visionary understanding of market needs, nor am I an enlightened CEO who pierced the secrets of the universe to offer a revolutionary solution.

It came from my personal need to know exactly what to expect from candidates in the process at any given moment, ensuring all processes were closed promptly.

While working as a freelancer, and later when I launched my own agency, FindIT, I simply had to optimise everything within my control to make my job easier, reduce risk, and secure a livelihood.

Then, I realised I could offer that same value to my clients through assessment reports.

Still, it is always crucial to clarify the boundaries of professional ethics to both clients and candidates: on our interviews, we absolutely do not deal with individuals' psychic lives or private problems.

We apply the postulates and principles of Gestalt psychotherapy exclusively for the purpose of professionally assessing their functioning in the workplace.

Diagnosing Functioning: Who Is the Person Behind the Code?

Using the principles of the Gestalt contact cycle, we diagnose how a candidate functions and what we can expect from them on the job.

Our goal is not for candidates to feel like they are being interrogated or sitting through an interview filled with a barrage of Google-style questions that even the interviewer doesn’t know why they are asking or how to apply the answers.

Through conversations about their experience, we clearly map out things that classic interview questions simply cannot reach:

• How the candidate establishes contact with the team and superiors; how they relate to the team when they are the authority, and how they respond to authority.

• How often they will change jobs and what exactly they need in a system to stay.

• Whether they will abandon you mid-project when a temporary roadblock occurs, or if they have the capacity to wait it out, be patient, finish what was started, and leave only when the work cycle is completely closed.

• Whether they expect exclusively delegated tasks or take initiative.

To paint a clearer picture, let’s take the example of a developer who is constantly in "action."

They join a new company, don't read the documentation, but immediately start writing code. In six months, they are so fast that you're ready to promote them to Tech Lead.

This person is excellent and perfect for a startup environment.

However, when the project slows down for two months for any reason, this person cannot stand the lull and moves on.

If you put someone like that onto a rigid platform in a corporation that requires a thousand approvals from a thousand different teams, they simply won't last a year.

They will be perfect for a startup context; it's just vital to keep in mind that their risk of burnout is massive.

On the other hand, you have people who expect strictly delegated tasks, as well as candidates who handle these repetitive and static project phases - and the positions themselves - entirely differently.

Should a QA engineer look for dynamic and action, or are they comfortable with repetitive work?

Our job is to know which candidate fits which client and vice versa, before the candidate even enters the selection process, so we only send a candidate to a client who genuinely needs their specific way of functioning.

The Team as a Living Organism (Aligning Real Needs)

We never perceive candidates as "bad" or "unadapted."

We believe there is a right candidate for every client and vice versa, and our task is to match them based on compatibility.

Why shouldn't we offer candidates positions where they will actually be happy, and clients people who perfectly match their specific management style?

The companies that hire us have clear needs, and they retain us to precisely address those needs, not to teach them their business.

And those needs vary drastically depending on the current team dynamics.

The psychological and social expectations for a person coming in as the first engineer on a project (who will lead people tomorrow and must act completely independently under pressure with little help) are completely different from a developer stepping into an already assembled, stable, and well-oiled system.

Similarly, team dynamics in some places depend entirely on authority, while other teams consist of multiple architects acting independently within the same team and product.

An Interview That Doesn’t Feel Like an Interview

To gather these crucial data points, our interviews don't have to last long at all. We obtain all this information through a dialogical relationship focused on their past projects and positions.

True, we have precisely defined questions, and close attention is paid to the words used, how they are spoken, and which words will serve these purposes.

However, because we anchor them to the conversation with the candidate and follow the flow of their presentation, the questions themselves are never isolated from the experience the candidate is sharing.

The point of our system is for candidates not to feel like they are undergoing some artificial interrogation or psychological survey, let alone a poorly conducted interview with generic Google questions that the interviewer themselves don’t understand or know the answer to.

When they feel an authentic space free of pressure, they want to be open and share their real experience.

From that experience, we extract their true professional needs, and in doing so, we respond to the needs of our clients and candidates in the most secure way possible.

It is important to note that we are not all born to do everything, nor do we all possess the same communication skills.

It is also vital to emphasise that every individual is fundamentally fulfilled by different things and different ways of operating.

Therefore, there is no negative selection here, nor are there bad clients, nor is anyone expected to squeeze into an artificial box and adapt to everyone.

Both the candidate and the client are viewed as a whole with their specific needs, desires, and experience, and are connected authentically through mutually meeting professional needs.

Recruitment, therefore, is not a mere trade, nor is it just typing keywords. It is the ability to make an accurate prediction of how a candidate and the team they are joining will function, through a deep understanding of both technology and human psychology.

Only then do we have a sustainable business, satisfied people, and stable code.