Questers vs Outsourcing - Questers

Questers vs Outsourcing

Writing this number one entry for Questers blog matched quite conveniently a local Bulgarian award we just won last week 'Top IT Employer - Outsourcing IT Services for 2014'. It was scheduled for me to come up with some thoughts to be published anyway, and this contest helped by triggering few thoughts.

It’s always good to receive awards and although it is quite pleasing I have to admit such recognition - “top employer” does not really surprise me. Since we started in 2008 delivering high performance through motivation and developing of our carefully selected and talented people was always the primary focus for Questers. Realization of this core value has helped us develop long term successful partnerships with many businesses and organizations in Europe and US.

We decided to build expertise in recruiting and managing purely high performing dedicated IT engineering teams. It was a new model back then, many new entrants appeared since, but we’re probably still one of quite few that stayed focused and avoided to get deeper into the technical side. It might look obvious now, but in practice has not been always easy as we were challenged by many tempting distractions/opportunities, offering higher margins and quicker growth. Instead we kept to our core and continued to reinvent and innovate the IT talent resourcing model we pioneered.

Back to our award - it has a longer name and falls into a category that adds some complexity. In fact the second part brings some unsettling feelings - just can’t have it all I guess. It has always been a problem for us where exactly to position our model. Qualifying as ‘outsourcing’ is a thing I’d strongly disagree about. Actually I cannot imagine that we’d have achieved something if we were doing ‘outsourcing’. All our people are strongly integrated with both the culture of Questers and as important, the culture of the client companies they are allocated to. We’d never move people from team to team as unnamed resources just managing short-term gaps and needs. I’m happy that our clients also value this and put effort into such integration which repays quickly and is much more successful than a ‘black-box’ outsourcing arrangement.

I’d prefer to look at Questers as an IT tech platform and inspiring environment that enables all involved – our people, our clients and the local IT community create connections, get better and just achieve more. That’s where we’ll keep our eyes on – in developing our people and create opportunities for them and for our clients and zooming out a bit – grow the entire Bulgarian economy.

Alexander Drangajov CEO