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Monthly Archives: May 2015

Why Being Late to IT Job Interviews is a Big Deal

Most IT professionals have been warned by their IT recruiters and IT staffing firms to never ever be late for interviews for IT jobs.  Unfortunately, being late usually means you’ll never get the job, nor will you win points with your IT staffing companies and technical recruiters.  Most people don’t know why being late to an IT job interview is such a problem, though.

The main reason it’s not ok to be late is that there isn’t really a good reason for it anymore.  Between smartphones, GPS, and of course your IT recruiting companies, you should be able to get good directions to your interview.  If you don’t take the time to consult any of these sources and get lost, then you’ll look particularly unprepared and not resourceful or good at problem-solving.  None of these are qualities you want attached to your name. So do what you have to do to make sure you’re 5 minutes early to all interviews.  It’s not even worth going if you don’t.

 

Creating Your LinkedIn Profile Picture to Attract IT Recruiters

If you’re looking for IT jobs, of the best ways to attract IT recruiters and IT staffing companies is to really polish and update your LinkedIn profile.  Your profile picture may seem like an afterthought, but it’s actually pretty important in making a good impression on IT staffing firms and IT recruiting companies.  A bad profile photo can give the wrong impression or worse – make technical recruiters bypass your profile completely.  Here are some key things to keep in mind when you’re adding your profile.

Firstly, make sure your face is visible in the picture.  This is what people will connect with and remember the most.  Secondly, make sure that recruiters can see your face—and everything else in the picture—well.  A blurry picture looks sloppy and suggests your IT skills might be subpar.  Take the time to add a well-taken and cropped photo.

Third, the composition of the photo doesn’t have to be fancy, but it shouldn’t be confusing.  Make sure you’re clearly the subject of the photo and nothing distracting is going on in the background.  You don’t want it to be hard for IT recruiting agencies to identify you in your own profile picture.  Lastly, your facial expression should be positive.  A simple smile is perfect here.  Especially in IT, where sometimes soft skills are at a premium, you want to look easy and pleasant to work with!

 

Can You Answer These IT Interview Questions

Prepping for interviews for IT jobs usually involves going over your best possible answers for the standard interview questions.  Perhaps you get some feedback and some instructions from your IT staffing firms and technical recruiters.  Here are some questions that you, your IT recruiters and IT staffing agencies may not think of in your preparations.  It’s worth noting that even though these questions aren’t obvious to you, IT recruiting companies and IT staffing companies are likely to recognize them.  They’re among the top 50 asked interview questions.

1. How would you deal with an upset client/user?  This is a common question for helpdesk positions or positions that are client and user-facing.  It’s important to have ideas about how to respond to these questions.  It will set you apart from your competition.

2. What would you achieve in the first 30, 60, or 90 days on the job?  This question seems more fit for a Presidential candidate, but they’re pretty relevant to project-based IT work.  Don’t wing it—take time to think about how you could contribute quickly and in an impactful way to the company you’re interviewing with.

 

Your IT Resume: Too Technical or Not Technical Enough?

Because the IT field has such a unique set of skills, sometimes IT professionals can be torn as to whom their resumes should be accessible to.  Should resumes speak to IT recruiters, IT staffing companies, and HR and be less technical?  Or should resumes go into the kind of technical detail that hiring managers and potential coworkers could understand (and might confuse technical recruiters, IT recruiting agencies, and people in HR)? The answer is, unfortunately, not so clear-cut:  it depends.

If you’re having a tough time deciding how much technical detail to leave in or take out of your resume, it could be worth it to develop two different resumes: one can be more technical.  One can be a more general version for your IT staffing agencies and IT recruiting firms, who often only need a picture of your career progression and skills. You can offer both versions to IT recruiting companies when they submit you to IT jobs.  They may use one, either, or both depending on the potential employer.  They may also help you meld the two together into a perfect version for the hiring manager.  Whatever the case may be, your preparation of 2 resumes will be useful to you and your IT staffing firms.

 

IT Resumes: It’s All About the Verbs

Nobody loves working on their resumes.  It can feel especially pointless when you know IT recruiters and IT staffing companies will be editing them further for you.  Even the best technical recruiters and IT staffing firms need you to send along a resume that you’ve put some work into.  One of the best tips for making a resume that will impress IT recruiting agencies is to focus on using strong, specific action verbs rather than over-used cliché adjectives.

What does this mean exactly? The most important part of your resume are the bullets under your previous IT jobs.  Each bullet is stronger when you begin it with a verb that points to an accomplishment, like ‘achieved,’ or ‘improved’.  Unfortunately sometimes IT professionals will focus on adjectives instead, describing themselves with clichéd terms instead of articulating the way they’ve contributed to past employers.  These terms don’t mean much to IT recruiting firms or hiring managers.  So do your IT staffing agencies and yourself a favor – focus on making a resume full of strong verbs, not weak adjectives.

 

Will News Be the Next Hot Field for IT Jobs?

Will IT recruiters and IT staffing agencies see a boom of IT jobs in the news industry soon?  While the news industry has been struggling to keep up with the pace of the internet and technology for a long time, it seems like Google is upping the ante.  Recently, Google pledged $160 million to 8 newspapers in the EU for a “Digital News Initiative.”  While this may not immediately bring a lot of IT jobs to technical recruiters and IT staffing firms in the US, or even in Europe, it says something about what the future may hold for IT professionals.

While it’s not a guarantee, it’s not uncommon for IT recruiting companies and IT staffing companies to see inklings of a hot new sub-field for IT in the news.  It’s also not a bad idea for IT professionals who are looking for jobs to consider building up skills that will be relevant to this sub-field!  It may win them a lot of attention from IT recruiting firms and their dream job.

 

White House Hacking Gives us Hints for Future IT Job Market

IT recruiters and IT staffing companies have known for a while that security is a hot area for IT jobs.  As people become more and more reliant on technology in daily life and business, hackers and cyberattacks become more and more common.  Technical recruiters and IT staffing firms have even more proof now that security is a very high priority area in tech.  Recently, the White House announced that Russian hackers accessed White House emails, information, and potentially some sensitive information of American citizens. 

With a high profile target like the White House, it’s obvious that there are more resources and IT professionals urgently needed to defend America’s digital property and interests.  If you’re searching for IT jobs, it’s worth noting that more and more IT recruiting agencies and IT staffing agencies will be seeking candidates with skills in security. Building up or acquiring applicable skills for security jobs will be a very worthy investment.     

Why Are There So Many Introverts in IT? And How Can it Help You Land a Job?

Why is it that IT recruiters and IT staffing companies find that most of their candidates for IT jobs are introverted?  It turns out the IT field draws a large amount of IT professionals who identify more as introverted than extroverted.  The jobs that technical recruiters and IT recruiting firms need to fill often require qualities that introverts seem to possess naturally: an ability to focus for long periods of time, especially on details; the ability to manage and follow through on one’s own workload, etc.

This means that over time, companies have come to value IT professionals who are particularly outgoing.  Because they’re rarer than more introverted candidates, companies are happy when IT staffing agencies can provide candidates who are exceptionally social.  If you’re searching for an IT job and you’ve got particularly good social skills that translate into the workplace, don’t be afraid to highlight them for your IT staffing firms.  They may be able to place you in better jobs for it!

 

Education, Privacy, and IT: A Conversation that’s Just Getting Started

As IT recruiters and IT staffing companies continue to find IT jobs flooding their inboxes and IT pervades most aspects of life, one question becomes more urgent: How do we deal with the legal quandaries of an IT-centric world?  One area where this is of particular concern is in education.  More IT in education has a lot of positive effects: it creates new jobs for technical recruiters and IT staffing firms to fill, new opportunities for students, and cheaper and more environmentally friendly materials for students and teachers.  It also creates some questions about the privacy of the students, especially the younger students, who use this technology.

Recently, the US government has stepped in with some progress towards dealing with these issues.  Since IT won’t get any less pervasive in education in the future, new bills are being created.  The Student Digital Privacy and Parental Rights Act of 2015 is one of the first bills to address these issues.  The bill suggests a few ways that student information should be made available and unavailable to parents and tech companies.  Though the bill seems unlikely to pass, especially in this first draft, IT professionals, IT recruiting companies, and IT staffing agencies will continue to see more legislation proposed to protect student privacy.  This bill is only the start of a long conversation to come—one that involves the IT field, Education, and the government.

 

Social Media Stocks Don’t Signal Doom for IT Professionals

Most IT recruiters and IT staffing firms can definitively say that the IT field is still growing at a breakneck pace.  Technical recruiters and staffing agencies continue to have trouble finding enough IT professionals to fill all the IT jobs their clients give them.

It’s surprising to everyone then, IT recruiting firms included, that a lot of the much-hyped IT companies that have recently gone public aren’t doing well in the stock market.  While these companies are certainly trying new strategies to increase presence, influence, and hype, they seem to be falling short in how much money they make.  Twitter, Constant Contact, and Facebook have all had less than stellar reports recently on Wall Street.  While this certainly doesn’t spell immediate doom for the IT industry, IT professionals, or IT recruiting companies, it’s definitely disappointing.  Social media in particular has a lot of hopes pinned on it for the future—it may have serious consequences if it can’t start to do better in the stock market.