From the machine room of TDF: International hirings

Hello,

in today’s article, I’d like to shed some light on the question: “Why do hirings take so long?” or “Why hasn’t the job role been filled yet?”

Define the role and the budget

The first task is to define the role to hire for. There’s so much to do at LibreOffice, but at the same time, only some roles can be etablished directly at TDF, as the budget is not unlimited. Usually, we try hire for roles that are either critical for the foundation’s operations, and/or enable the community to do things, and/or for tasks that require quick and reliable commitment. Having knowledge in the foundation, to be openly and transparently shared with the community, is another aspect how we identify roles to hire for.

Job openings also need to be budgeted for, which requires an understanding about the compensation. Further down, you’ll see why this is not trivial. Usually, we budget for an average compensation based on our experience, which sometimes is exceeded, sometimes then underspent.

It’s also not always easy to reach agreement on which roles to hire. As one example, during the first developer hirings, there was a discussion on “How to make sure they don’t compete with other open source projects, or the ecosystem companies?” and whether “TDF in-house developers will not compete with commercial contributors and will not develop alternative implementations of Open Source projects actively maintained by LibreOffice volunteer or corporate contributors”.

Views on that differ obviously, but such discussions can be time consuming and take several months.

Write the job description

The second task is to write a proper job description, that gives an understanding of the role, but at the same time leaves enough flexibility to grow and evolve in the role. We have a template with the most important administrative bits and pieces, but the role description is important to know which skills to hire, and it will also be part of the contract later on.

Interview candidates

One of the most challenging parts is to run the job interviews. The amount of applications to our job opening have grown over the past years, and these days it’s not unusual to have 30, 40 or even more applications for one role. Interviewing all of them is impossible, because a properly prepared, conducted and evaluated interview easily takes 2-3 hours of time of 2-3 people plus the candidate.

Such interviews are usually staffed with people who have the necessary technical insight to the role, often members of the team, and at a later stage also with representatives of the board and/or me as executive director.

Preselecting the candidates to interview is a demandig task: Skills needs to be assessed, salary requests evaluated, and last but not least, the applicants should be a good fit for the team. While I don’t have actual statistics at hand, from a gut feeling I’d say the final round of applicants to interview is usually between 10-20% of applicants in total.

International hirings and contractual parameters

Once final candidates have been chosen, another truly demanding task is to agree on contractual parameters. Two things come to play here, that make very TDF different from many other organizations:

We hire worldwide

This is quite unusual for an organization of our size. Usually, other organizations hire in countries where they have a legal representative and an office. That would mean that all candidates who want to apply for a job at TDF must live in or willing to relocate to Germany before starting the job.

One of our great strengths is that we work with talent around the world. We aim for diversity, different views, different cultures - and last but not least, different timezones, so we can serve the community around the clock. :wink:

We want to offer employment

Something that not all other organizations or companies do is to offer actual employment when possible. If people commit themselves to work for us, put their dedication, skills and passion into the project, we consider it just fair to provide the safety of an employment. Only employees enjoy an actual vacation, sick leave, public holidays and other benefits.

So, if you compare the hiring process at TDF with your own dayjob, first ask yourself the question if you are contracted or have been actually offered employment in your country of residence, without the need to relocate.

How does this work?

In several countries, TDF could in theory employ also without a physical office, in others we couldn’t. However, managing all the local rules and regulations ourselves, and registering with the authorities, is quite a challenge, in particular as we usually have only one to two employees per country, which multiplies the effort. Also other countries have social security audits and filing requirements which we then have to fulfil next to our obligations in Germany.

One lesser known example in Germany is the G37 eye examination, which the employer must offer to the employees (and not the contractors). Other countries might have similar regulations.

TDF therefore works with service providers who handle the actual employment, payroll and local compliance.

What are the challenges?

This, however, has its price: TDF pays the employer costs, a management fee of approximately 600 USD per month, plus 19% VAT on top of everything. This seems expensive, but is much less expensive than setting up our own office abroad.

Additionally, parameters per country are often significantly different and hard to compare. For example, in Austria, there are collective agreements for many more roles, and it seems common to have 14 monthly salaries. In the US, the average annual vacation is much lower than for several European countries, and the notice period is shorter. Some countries have only a limited amount of sick leave, which is uncommon in Germany.

Fair salary assessments are another challenge. It’s tough already for Germany, where we know the market best, but for other countries it’s even much more challenging. In order to compare the candidates, we need to get an understanding for each application. We need to assess how the requested contractual parameters compare to the respective country’s standards, so we treat everyone fairly, no matter where they live. This means converting compensation, vacation and other parameters to make them comparable. We also need to assess and whether a potentially lower salary request is actually less expensive, due to the higher administrative costs for employing out of Germany.

Over the course of contractual negotiations, some surprises can happen. Just lately, in one country I stumbled over very inflexible work schedules. Other countries have specific regulations regarding health insurance. For some countries, one would need a person named to be in charge to comply with all the local regulations - often in countries where we have no one with knowledge of the legal system, nor the language.

Even when the contract is signed, surprises can occur. As one example, getting the A1 confirmation is something we should also take care of for the service provider-employed employees, as otherwise it would be detrimental for them. Just this year, it took us several weeks and repeated inquiries to get the documents.

I hope that sheds some light on why things take sometimes longer here than anticipated.

TDF goes the extra mile to be very flexible where we employ, tries to treat everyone fair and provide proper work contracts, but that takes more time than hiring just in one country.

Florian

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Here is the FR translation:

https://listarchives.libreoffice.org/fr/discuss/2025/msg00097.html