Retention vs Poaching: how to prevent competitors from hunting your team for a +€500 Offer

Anastasiia Karmazina is the Head of HR and Talent Acquisition in an iGaming startup. Beyond just closing key roles for international projects, she builds processes from scratch and scales teams. Her portfolio spans both big holdings and ambitious startups, with a core focus on systematic hiring, team growth, and culture-building.

In iGaming, trends flash like symbols on a slot machine. Competition, stress, and tight deadlines land on the reels for sure — all people get them. But while everyone hopes to trigger a “Bonus” or to hit a “Big Win,” the relentless release schedule leaves no room even for a breather. This pressure doesn’t just concern the product or the marketing, it hits the people first.

We whisper about how hard it is to find and keep talent in the hallways of industry events, but we rarely discuss it openly. The media broadcast success stories, but in reality, it’s the team that decides whether a project becomes a market leader or remains just “another provider.”

The Hiring Market: An Offer is No Longer the Finish Line

The signs of an overheated market are clear: salaries have hit the ceiling, but motivation is losing steam. Candidates are choosing offers based on bonus size rather than the scope of work. Companies pay for experience but instead get staff who tend to escape rather than build long-term relationships.

In my opinion, iGaming is currently a candidate’s market—especially for hotshot integrators, BDMs, product leads, or wizard mathematicians and analysts. Skilled pros with real industry experience easily get 2–3 offers in a single week. We’ve seen it happen. To stay competitive, we completely rebuilt our recruiting, reducing the time from first contact to offer by 30% without sacrificing the quality of the assessment.

Beyond the paycheck, candidates care about the speed of the process and a sense of perspective.

What actually works:

• Velocity: A highly compressed hiring cycle.
• Transparency: Trust is built on fairness at every single stage.
• Impact: Showing them their real influence on the product and their path for growth.

We’ve also learned to tailor roles to the individual. This helps unlock a candidate’s strengths and allows us to make a truly competitive proposal. If the offer used to be the final point, today it’s just the start of the negotiation. “How we build the team is how we’ll fly”—that was my mantra at the start, and it has become the foundation of our entire approach.

Startups vs. Corporates: The Collapse of the Stability Illusion

A major challenge for us is competing with big holdings. Everyone has their own “aces” to play:

• Startups: Speed, influence, flexibility, and the chance to build from scratch.
• Corporates: Stability, established processes, a recognizable brand, and scale.

My job as an HR leader is to sell the role without “selling a dream.” I have to be honest about the work format, because the №1 reason for early turnover is when reality fails to meet expectations.

I’ve noticed a fascinating trend: top-tier talents used to crave big corporations for the perceived stability. But after waves of global layoffs and restructurings, it’s clear that “corporate” no longer means “safe.” Now distinguished specialists are increasingly intentionally choosing startups. They want less legacy and less bureaucracy, even if it comes with a smaller salary. Meaningful work and the speed of execution have become more important than a guarantee of stability that doesn’t actually exist.

The “Golden Handcuffs” Trap

From my perspective, the hardest part is salary expectations that grow faster than the actual business. A candidate might anchor their expectations to an offer from a giant holding with entirely different resources and structure. This creates a dilemma: do you overpay and risk unbalancing the team, or do you let a great specialist just walk away?

In iGaming, this line is incredibly thin. The industry is small; everyone knows everyone and loves to gossip about that one outlier case of an inflated compensation package.

Experience shows that a high salary only keeps a candidate happy for about two months. My tactic is not to “cut” a candidate immediately because of the budget. We talk about numbers, but we also emphasize the strengths of our ecosystem: autonomy, high-level responsibility, and future growth. Most importantly, we explain the logic behind the compensation. Helping a candidate see the bigger business picture and our current development stage prevents them from feeling like they’ve hit a glass ceiling.

This transparency works. It helps us attract people with an ownership mindset—those ready for responsibility and who actually thrive in a startup environment. Today, we have very few rejections based solely on money—less than 5% at the final stage. It’s the transparency, the potential, and the quality of the dialogue that closes the deal.

Retention vs. Aggressive Poaching

The market has become a battlefield where poaching is the primary hiring method. This creates constant stress for employees who are regularly bombarded with “sweetheart” offers.

Because of this, the real challenge isn’t trying to lock people in to prevent poaching—it’s creating an atmosphere they don’t want to leave. The industry is moving at breakneck speed. Everyone talks about the chaos and the “market specifics” while hunting talent by any means. But few are systematically addressing the fact that people are simply burning out.

Retention isn’t about how to squeeze an extra two months out of someone. It’s about building a predictable, comfortable environment where people don’t run away because someone offered an extra €500 or because they’re exhausted by the mess, the overwork, and the lack of system. A true retention strategy is creating a space where people want to grow.

At MEGAFAIR, we’ve bet everything on this. We have regular 1:1s, transparent processes, and employees who actually influence decisions. We constantly review workloads and responsibilities to prevent burnout. Most importantly, we stopped seeing people as “profit-generating functions” and started seeing them as partners. This creates long-term loyalty. It helped us drop our turnover rate from 12% (already decent) to just 5%.

People or Processes: Which Matters Most?

Businesses need metrics, forecasts, and clear goals. But people need the exact same things!

HR’s job isn’t just to “hire and scale.” It’s to help newcomers navigate the industry and provide transparent processes without losing the personal touch. My advice? Don’t fear experiments, and never turn people into a faceless “resource.”

The resilience of any business is built on trust. And trust only grows where there is a system, respect, and a long-term outlook. In 2026, that is the only real competitive advantage in iGaming recruitment.