SuperJob
Moving to Pachca after Slack was blocked and a stint on an open source team chat app
About the company
Hi! I'm Konstantin, IT director at SuperJob. We've been around for 24 years, and our team has 270 people. We help people find jobs they love. In numbers: more than 2.2 million employers are registered on our service, and our database holds more than thirty million resumes.
Life before Pachca
Like many companies, we used Slack. When it left in spring 2022, we looked at different options among Russian services and open source solutions. Back then, we went with a self-hosted open source team chat app because it had the features we needed.
After we moved, the company behind that app started adding limits to our plan: 10,000 push notifications per month for the whole company, which we burned through in 1-2 days. Or, when the 200th user connected to the server, everyone's online status switched from green, yellow and red to orange. So in the afternoon, you couldn't tell who was at their desk and who wasn't, because statuses weren't available. Over time, the limits got to the point where our plan allowed only 50 people. That's when we started looking at migration options.
At one stage of the transition, we used another Russian service. Our CRM had built-in chats, so we decided to give them a try. The chat was browser-only, and the features weren't a fit for us at all. So we kept looking and came across Pachca.
The moment we knew we wanted to stay
There's an old joke: "How did you pick that hat?" "I put it on, and it fit." Same with us: we looked at Pachca, saw it was easy to use and went with it. The dev team is happy, and I'm twice as happy. The easy, familiar interface helped a lot. That's why the switch was completely seamless. As soon as we logged in to Pachca, it felt like we'd been working there forever. We moved to open source with tears in our eyes, but we left it for Pachca with joy.
How Pachca changed the way we communicate
It's hard to say anything changed dramatically in our workflow. We have lots of well-tuned integrations, and they kept working just fine. The good part: we switched tools, and it didn't affect our processes at all. We didn't have to adjust anything.
For me, integrations matter a lot, because my workday starts with monitoring. I want alerts to work reliably and other services to be easy to plug in.
Tips for making the switch
Make the process iterative. If some of your employees already know Pachca, run your first test with them. Let them try the core features, integrations and shared chats, and see how your current workflow maps onto the new tool.
If it works for them, bring in people who've never heard of Pachca and see what they say. That's how we onboarded our top management. Their whole job is communication, and they won't put up with major inconveniences.
After that, you can gradually bring in different departments. It's best to do the migration itself over a weekend. Prepare migration guides and set up a shared chat for Pachca questions, so employees can get comfortable faster.
