IT Recruiting Pool Expands
IT recruiters and IT staffing agencies have seen a recent surge in candidates flocking from a surprising place: Wall Street. As IT staffing companies attempt to fill IT jobs for IT managers, they find more and more applicants fleeing from the nadir of work-life balance that young finance professionals face.
These new IT consultants find that as they break their golden handcuffs, they find more flexible hours in the information technology field and more laid-back workplaces. They also find a hiring culture that is more dependent on IT recruiting companies and IT contractors, IT managers. Despite all of these differences, though, IT jobs seem to be equally as demanding as finance jobs. New IT contractors from the finance world must still bring their A game to work and their job hunts with IT recruiting firms.
Please Join Us in Helping the Boston Marathon Victims
AVID’s IT recruiters Boston, IT recruiters CA, along with all IT professionals in the Boston area were shocked by the tragedies at the Boston marathon last week. AVID will be donating to Roseann’s recovery fund. Please join us or consider donating to the Boston One Fund, or to Jeff Bauman’s fund. The cost of recovery will be great for these many victims, but you can help alleviate at least some of their burden.
Helping After the Boston Marathon Tragedy
In response to last Monday’s horrific events, AVID Technical Resources will be donating to the fund for Roseann Sdoia(http://www.gofundme.com/roseann). AVID urges IT professionals and others to consider also donating to this worthy cause.
In the wake of the horrible Boston marathon bombings, showing support for Roseann is one way to begin rebuilding our city’s heart. Roseann bravely begins her recovery from some devastating injuries. Please join us in honoring her and her loved ones as they begin the process of healing.
Education Strives to Keep Up with IT
In a struggle to keep up with the constantly changing demands of the information technology field, universities are creating new educational programs to create IT professionals ready to participate in the hottest areas, such as Big Data. IT recruiters will able to select from pools of IT contractors with new degrees in very current areas, like Big Data or social media-oriented marketing programs.
IT staffing agencies will no longer stretch to reconcile resumes with IT jobs that require very specific and very new skills. Cornell is creating, aided by a grant from NY, a school specifically geared towards the skills needed to develop start-ups. These graduates may well be the CEOs and IT managers that IT staffing companies help to develop teams for. IT headhunters may also be contacting graduates of Columbia, the University of San Francisco, or many other universities, where programs are being developed specifically to graduate big data specialists. Whichever new hot area IT recruiting companies are especially interested, they will soon have a specified pool of IT consultants to choose from.
IT Raises its Presence in a Surprising Arena
IT recruiting firms, IT managers, and IT consultants are all still discussing a surprising topic: national policy. IT staffing agencies and other IT professionals, even those as influential as Mark Zuckerberg, began a heated conversation about H-1B workers several months ago as the nation considered significantly increasing the number of H-1B visas allowed per year.
The debate over how often IT recruiting companies submit foreign resumes versus American resumes for IT contractors has been a problem for years. IT staffing firms have suggested, with much contesting from American workers, that there simply are too few US candidates for the IT jobs they fill. The new serious moves towards allowing more H-1B’s has simply fanned the flames of a fire that the information technology industry has quietly been burning. The final result of the actual debate may not even interest the rest of the nation outside the IT sector. What might be the most lasting impact may simply be the entrance of loud, passionate voices from technical recruiters in the midst of political conversation.
Building a Positive IT Team
The best companies to work for are the ones where “service with a smile” isn’t just a façade for customers or clients, it’s natural. This is especially true of companies in information technology because it so often ends up being more of a “back of the house” industry where grumpy IT consultants could easily hide behind a computer screen. IT recruiters and IT managers can focus on particular qualities when finding IT contractors to fill IT jobs and create great culture in a company.
IT recruiters firstly need to look for optimistic and enthusiastic candidates. The importance of hiring people who are naturally “glass half full” types is imperative. This is not a “fluff” topic that should come second to resumes. Secondly, IT staffing companies should identify candidates who carry two personality traits: kindness and service. Both of these traits are at the core of what makes a good team player. It’s easy for IT professionals to call themselves “team players,” but it’s harder to fake having these character traits. Lastly, IT staffing agencies should attempt to find candidates they think will be likely to polish and improve a company’s image with every interaction they have with clients and business contacts. By choosing candidates with these personality characteristics, IT recruiting firms are not only building a strong IT team, but also a healthy one that will retain its members.
How Will the IT Sector Keep Up With Job Demand
How will America keep up with its information technology sector job growth? Though the market of IT professionals waxes and wanes, its American portion is still problematically low for the amount of IT jobs technical recruiters are trying to fill. (A large portion of American IT consultants seem to disagree with this reading of the market.) There seem to be two major methods of dealing with this dearth of IT contractors for IT staffing agencies and IT managers: increasing H-1B visa allowances and increasing education for future IT professionals.
The attempts to increase education certainly have drawbacks for IT staffing firms in particular. IT staffing companies today dealing with a lack of candidates now will have to continue to wait as programs that are mostly targeted at younger students slowly build the IT professionals of tomorrow. There are also no guarantees that these efforts to motivate young children, especially girls, will even actually yield a greater pool of candidates for IT recruiting companies.
The second effort at creating more candidates for IT recruiting agencies is obviously problematic from a national standpoint. Are we hurting our own citizens when we allow more H-1B visas, or are we simply enriching our economy and population? With two major efforts occurring, there are still plenty of drawbacks to be dealt with. The search for an effective way to get more candidates for IT recruiters continues.
What Happens in IT (Should) Stay in IT
The information technology industry certainly holds a fascination for more than just the IT managers, IT recruiting firms and IT consultants in its borders. It’s undeniable that IT professionals and their companies, like Google, Yahoo, and Facebook, regularly make the news. However, the hard lesson that JC Penney had to learn last week is that what works for IT jobs, doesn’t always work in other industries.
It recruiting companies and IT contractors are well aware of the test first, tweak later ethos of the IT world. This strategy crashed and burned, however, as former Apple executive Ron Johnson attempted it in J.C. Penney’s attempt to restore itself to glory in the retail world. Though IT staffing companies might have easily recognized Johnson’s intentions to beta test various marketing strategies, the pace of retail simply did not support them. Technical recruiters might also have found Johnson’s radical changes to Penney’s inventory very familiar. But, what works in a business that changes at the pace of the internet doesn’t always work in stores full of huge shipments of retail that move at a much, much slower pace. Radical changes are fine when they can be retracted or will become relevant in a shorter period of time. They are not fine when applied to an industry like retail that must operate at a much slower pace. While Johnson attempts to re-orient himself as he recovers from a JC Penney ousting, IT staffing agencies are taking note: what happens in the IT world should stay in the IT world.
Job Hopping in IT
IT jobs are certainly not meant to be proverbial lily pads. However, in a tough economy with an even tougher economy behind us, IT recruiters and IT managers are exercising more leniency towards so-called “Job Hoppers.” While IT staffing agencies would not consider resumes full of short stints ideal, they are far less likely to simply throw them out than other industries might be. IT recruiting companies know that with a dramatic start-up bubble, and of course its dramatic burst, in our past some IT consultants are likely to have at least one or two short blips of jobs on their resumes. Additionally, with contracting being much more common in information technology, short blips also are far more welcomed by technical recruiters than perhaps in any other industry. While IT staffing firms are likely to be more accepting of erratic resumes, IT contractors need to be able to properly explain the brevity of these jobs. Suggesting to IT recruiting firms that one has left a job quickly because of boredom or to seek out more earning potential will raise some red flags. Suggesting to IT headhunters, on the other hand, that a job was short-lived because the company was, will ameliorate their image of oneself as employable.
Why the IT World Is Obsessed with Yahoo
Why are IT recruiters and IT consultants obsessed with Yahoo’s moves? IT staffing firms and IT consultants, along with most other IT professionals, seem fixated on most, if not every move that Yahoo and its new CEO Marisssa Mayer make.
Mayer’s Telecommuting policy sparked a nation-wide debate by IT recruiters CA to IT recruiters Boston. IT recruiting companies couldn’t stop talking about Mayer’s initial appointment. And now as Yahoo acquires Summly and other start-ups, IT staffing firms are just continuing the conversation. Of course IT recruiting agencies are generally concerned with the goings-on in Google or Facebook, However, Yahoo has ignited the information technology field’s interest in a special way.
While there could be many reasons IT headhunters can’t look away from Yahoo and Mayer, the answer could largely be that Yahoo is not so different from the America right now. After a devastating fall from grace, Yahoo and America are attempting to pick up the pieces. And with a very strong symbolic and real correlation between the two, IT staffing agencies are waiting with baited breath to see if they can successfully put themselves back together.