Any IT project sooner or later faces crises. Sometimes these are bugs, sometimes deadlines are missed, and sometimes all at once. But the worst thing is when the team suddenly loses a key specialist at a critical stage. This happened to us: three weeks before the release, our only tester left the project for personal reasons.
The situation has turned out to be extremely unfortunate. The functionality is almost ready, there are many bugs, regression testing has not even begun. There is no one to delegate tasks to, the developers are overloaded, and the client is waiting for a stable build. We are trapped between burnout and failure.
Time passed and reputation was at stake
All standard scenarios were considered: quickly find a freelancer, connect a partner outsourcing, ask for help from familiar teams. But each of these paths either took time or did not provide confidence in the quality. We understood: searching “at random” meant wasting precious days that could have been spent on testing.
At this stage, we first heard about Volna at https://itvolna.tech, a service for selecting IT specialists for business tasks. This is not an exchange or an agency in the classic sense. Volna works as a flexible HR partner: it quickly connects proven professionals, takes on all organizational issues and offers an hourly cooperation model. This suited us perfectly.
48 hours later, we had a QA engineer again
The first thing that pleasantly surprised us was the clarity and speed of communication. Just a couple of hours after the first request, we spoke with a manager who not only clarified the stack and tasks, but immediately offered a format for work, told us how onboarding was going and what risks there were. It was felt that the Volna team understands the specifics of technical projects and knows how to speak the same language with developers.
The next day, we were offered two candidates. Both had relevant experience, good English, excellent knowledge of our stack (Postman, JIRA, Cypress, REST API, basic SQL) and an understanding of CI/CD processes. One of them was especially impressive – not only with his experience, but also with his willingness to immediately delve into the project. A day after the interview, he was already conducting smoke tests, filing bugs and commenting on tasks in the tracker.
Flexibility of format is not just “convenient”, it is strategically correct
Volna offers an “on-demand” model – a specialist is connected as needed, the work is recorded by the hour, and all the paperwork is taken care of. We did not register an employee as a full-time employee, did not spend resources on HR or accounting – we simply signed a contract with Volna and started working.
This is especially important for startups and small IT teams that cannot afford to maintain a bloated staff. When needed, QA is involved, when the sprint ends or a pause begins, everything is transparently suspended. And at the same time, the person remains in the context of the project and can quickly return.
This was a real revelation for our team. Especially considering that the project was distributed: development in one country, management in another, and the client in a third. And the specialist from Volna turned out to be not just an effective performer, but a real part of the team. He offered ideas for automation, improved documentation, and even helped improve communication between the front and back end thanks to the competent formalization of bug reports.
How one successful experience changes the approach to everything
Three months have passed, and we continue to cooperate with Volna — now not in an emergency, but in a planned mode. During this time, we tested two release versions, implemented automation of smoke scenarios, launched pre-release monitoring. All this — with minimal time spent on hiring, training and integration.
Today, we use Volna not only as an “ambulance” in critical situations, but also as a strategic partner for flexible hiring. If a narrow task appears or the resource for DevOps, QA, frontend sag – we have a reliable channel through which you can get the right person in a couple of days.
Bottom Line: When Hiring Becomes Part of a DevOps Approach
The speed of response, the technical level of specialists, the flexible interaction model and the absence of bureaucracy – this is what makes Volna useful not only for startups, but also for mature teams. In conditions when releases are accelerating, and flexibility is becoming part of the development culture, such services cease to be a “temporary patch” and turn into a full-fledged element of the technological process.
If you work in a dynamic IT environment where speed and accuracy are important, you will definitely appreciate this approach. We have already revised our view on hiring. And we can say with confidence: sometimes the right partner is more important than a dozen interviews.
