Company warned of hacker threat as it looks east for IT staff

A SCOTTISH recruitment company is this week leading a mission to Hungary and Slovakia to bring eastern European skilled workers back to Scotland in a bid to plug the shortage of IT staff.

Tim Newall-Watson, a director of Synphonix, said there were a lot of good people with technical skills in Hungary, Slovakia, and Russia, desperate to improve their earning power in the West. "There are redun-dancies being made on a global scale but Western companies are still looking very hard for technically very qualified staff."

However, in the former Eastern Bloc countries, there are local sensitivities about losing talented people at a time when they are seeking accession to the EU.

"In the Scottish market, people are moving from one software firm to another, leaving gaps where they left. This has pushed up salaries," said Newall-Watson.

Cathy Stringer, head of human resources at IndigoVision, last week said she hopes to hire as many as 12 Russians "as soon as possible."

Many Russians coming to the UK for interviews are mathe-maticians who left poorly-paid jobs at the country's scientific and military establishments in order to work as software designers. In Russia they would earn at most #9,500 a year as software developers compared to #40,000 plus in the UK.

Mark Shaw, director of e-security at Buchanan International who has a background in military intelligence, warned that companies hiring staff or entering into partnerships with companies in the former Soviet bloc should vet very thoroughly.

"There's a lot of former KGB members out there looking for work. And there are a lot of links between the former administration in the Soviet bloc and organised crime," he said. "The repercussions of getting it wrong could be disastrous."

But Newall-Watson said: "Hacking is a global issue and not attached to any particular country."

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