Tag Archives: IT jobs

Before Accepting an IT Job Counteroffer….

You have frustrations with your IT job, the company or the IT manager that you work for.  Ultimately, you decide that you’re better in a different environment so you begin contacting IT recruiting companies to find your next opportunity.  IT recruiters set you up with technical job interviews and you land a position that meets your skills and requirements.

When you give your notice, your IT manager comes back with a substantial counter offer to try to keep you from leaving.  Do you keep it or leave your IT job?  It’s a tough decision, but think about the following:

1)  If you stay, management will always know that you were on the look out for other IT jobs.

2)  If you stay, you’ll likely have a bulls-eye on your back as the company will know you were willing to break your loyalty and leave.

3)  There was a reason why you contacted IT staffing companies in the first place.  There was a reason why you accepted to go on IT job interviews from various technical recruiters.  There was a reason why you wanted to leave.  Unless it was purely financial, those reasons aren’t likely to change.

Contact our IT recruiters Boston here at AVID and jump-start your career.

Submit Your Resume to An IT Recruiter or Client?

You see an IT job posting for a company that you’re very interested in working for – then you see the same position posted by various IT recruiting companies.   Who do you submit your resume to and do you submit to mulitple IT recruiters.  The answer might surprise you.  Submit your resume to the technical recruiter at the IT recruiting firm that is most reputable and/or you have a relationship with.  Here’s why:

1)  Submitting directly to the client could go into an HR black hole.  Remember that not HR are trained to recruit on IT jobs.  Therefore, even if they receive your resume, they may not know whether your a fit for the position.

2)  Once you submit your resume directly to the client, you’re “their property.”  Therefore, if IT recruiters Boston try to submit you thereafter, the company could reject it (then never even contact you).

3)  The IT staffing company may have a relationship with the direct hiring manager.  Therefore, by working through the IT recruiting agency, your resume may not only go directly to the source, the IT recruiter may be able to pursuade the IT manager to speak or meet with you based on their relationship.

Therefore, working directly with IT recruiting agencies is your best chance of landing that next information technology opportunity.

Power Hiring in Technical Recruiting

Technical recruiters on top of their game understand that placing technical candidates within any industry isn’t just about matching a skill-set to an IT job description. There’s a lot more to consistently producing winning candidates who clinch IT jobs than pure background & skills. The IT recruiters who understand the issue of fit will be the one who comes out ahead in most cases.  Technical recruiters who consults mentors who have been in the staffing industry longer than themselves will find that they can learn from techniques developed by veterans of the industry — a practice known as benchmarking. Top performing IT recruiters Boston who have developed strong benchmarking strategies have a track record of success stemming from their ability to continually replicate the process of making strong information technology candidate recommendations that result in strong hires.

What are the secrets to identifying a high performer? A technical recruiter will have limited access to a candidate — perhaps communicating by phone & email, & sometimes in person, but for limited periods of time. With only a small window of time available to assess a candidate’s strength’s, weaknesses, personality, culture fit & potential red flags, a technical recruiter has to have an arsenal of pointed questions. An ineffective question is wasted time, so IT recruiters need to constantly analyze what each question they pose during screening reveals to them about the technical candidate. If even one question IT headhunters tends to ask an IT candidate doesn’t have a solid answer to this question, the question should be discarded. Time is of the essence, so a question that fails to bring new information to light takes up time both a candidate & IT recruiting companies can’t afford to lose. An efficient interviewing process is one example of a benchmarking strategy, but the best way to learn more is to network directly with IT staffing companies with high placement rates. Contact successful technical recruiters on Linkedin, or at tech networking events & ask them for their thoughts. The quickest route to achievement is to benefit from other’s trial & error, & resulting sucesses.

IT Staffing Agencies vs Human Resources

For IT recruiting companies, human resources is a department that often sparks feuds and a source of friction.  However, in some cases, HR is actually a critical ally for IT staffing firms and various independent technical recruiters.  Here are two scenarious that provide positive and negative repercussions when HR and IT staffing companies collide:

Positive:  In many companies, all contract and permanent IT hiring is channeled through human resources.  Therefore, from the perspective of IT recruiting firms, getting to know the key HR figures is a key component to success for technical staffing agencies.  Furthermore, instead of getting to know every line manager, from the Help Desk to Applications Development, IT recruiters can focus their effort on building relationships with just a handful of key personnel in the Human Resources department to secure all open IT jobs.

Negative:  Some HR departments look at IT recruiting agencies as competition and fear their job may be on the line if they outsource too many high-tech positions to technical recruiting companies.  Therefore, it’s

Additionally, some HR departments are in an internal power struggle with the various IT managers and staff to get everything centralized.  Therefore, when IT staffing agencies circumvent HR and get information technology needs directly from hiring managers, this undermines everything they’re trying to do from a process persective.

Therefore, while HR and technical recruiters can work well with one another, and ultimately need one another, there can be friction in many situations.  IT recruiters Boston never know until they contact each new client as every company is different.

Can Facebook Help Your IT Job Search?

Everyone’s favorite social networking site, Facebook, plans to launch its own job board later this summer. The board will aggregate IT job postings from third-party sites and make them searchable to Facebook users. Considering the massive reach of the site, 955 million monthly active users, of which more than half are daily users, 552 million, the idea may seem like a dream for all IT recruiters, IT job seekers, employers or IT recruiting companies. Two debates are raised however on the effectiveness and appropriateness of Facebook as a professional IT job seeking and technical recruiting tool.

One fundamental question for Facebook’s potential new job board is how to publish open positions to its multitude of users. The site exists to promote social networking and while it may be one aspect of this, IT job searching is not the main reason people visit Facebook. If IT jobs were to solely take the form of ads on the side of the page, they could likely be ignored as most other ads on Facebook are. Another proposed idea is to include job postings directly in newsfeeds, using information in a user’s profile and timeline activity to match particular interests or skills. Considering the way we use Facebook, newsfeed job postings may be annoying and overlooked. Maybe Facebook should call up one of Boston’s top IT staffing firms and have our web designers and programmers create the solution.

As AVID IT recruiters Boston can tell you, matching the perfect candidates with our IT job openings is tough work. Considering my own carefully maintained Facebook profile and those of my many friends, it seems the information published by Facebook users may not provide the best source for matching technical jobs. Facebook profiles most often do not include extensive information about one’s professional experience, interests, or skills. Listing a workplace or position is not even a profile requirement.  Take a look at Facebook’s professionally minded step-sister, LinkedIn, on the other hand. LinkedIn by design is a means to display your information technology career information in detail and invite employers and IT recruiters MA to view it and reach out. A Facebook profile showcases very different aspects of one’s life – 1000s of pictures from college and your recent family trip, life updates and that great song you just listened to, rather than your project details at work.

There’s always the risk too of showcasing the wrong personal life details with the wrong professional contacts. People have failed interviews and lost jobs for precisely this reason. If Facebook users were to alter their profiles to make them more professional in nature and appealing to IT recruiting firms, by deleting those photos of you and your college roommates at the bar in matching pumpkin Halloween costumes (guilty) and adding complete professional resume details (boring) wouldn’t we lose the appeal and charm of our most beloved and addicting work distraction (just kidding, boss)?

LinkedIn was built as a professional networking site, allowing users to make connections with people they are not necessarily friends with, or may not even know personally, but who may provide insight into a desired career. We understand Facebook as a place for friends to connect and share socially with each other (even those 200 “friends” you’ve barely, or never, met but you still convince yourself it’s not creepy to look through every picture from their last trip to the beach.) While all IT job seekers should be using LinkedIn to connect with other IT professionals who offer networking opportunities and career advice, do you really want to “friend” your IT recruiter on Facebook?

Finding the Balance of Contacting IT Recruiters

IT recruiters speak with hundreds of candidates each week.  Therefore, it’s imperative that information technology professionals keep in touch with their short-list of technical recruiters and their respective IT staffing companies Boston.  However, where is the line?

On one hand, you need to make sure you’re the first person a technical recruiter calls when they receive the appropriate position that fits your technical skills.  Regardless of how strong of a relationship you might have with the IT recruiter, there are likely dozens of other candidates with the same skill set who think the same.  Therefore, finding the balance between staying in touch with technical recruiting firms without being a pest can be difficult.

In our experience, the rule of thumb is no more than one contact (either an email or phone call) is acceptable each week.  This provides a refresher for the IT headhunter and gives you the chance to call at the right time in the event the IT staffing firm happens to receive a position that fits your background that very day.

Anything more than one contact per week crosses the line of harrassment.  Remember, IT recruiters typically make their living by putting people to work.  Therefore, they’re just as motivated to contact you when the right IT jobs open up.  However, timing is everything and candidates do fall through the cracks, so be sure to keep in touch.

IT Jobs are Heating Up!

Being an IT recruiting company, we’ve been a pretty good barometer on the national technology IT job market.  The local IT staffing Boston industry itself has remained steady even in the worst of times.  However, as our nation climbs out of one of the worst economic downturns our country has ever seen, IT jobs are becoming more bountiful than the technology candidates themselves.

Among the hottest technical jobs are rightfully the hottest technologies.  Microsoft’s .NET and Sun Microsystems’ Java remain the hottest development languages.  Oracle continues to dominate the database side, with Sharepoint and Peoplesoft being additional technologies still very much in demand.

Therefore, if you’re an IT consultant or someone looking to break into the information technology world, be sure to follow the latest trends then find the proper training program that meets these demands accordingly.

For additional thoughts or advice, please contact one of our national IT recruiters or IT recruiters Boston today.

What Characteristics Make Up Good IT Recruiters?

I’m often asked the question “what characteristics make up a good IT recruiter.”  My honest answer, and immediate response, is always “hard work.”  You cannot substitute hard work in the IT staffing industry.  The harder (and often longer) technical recruiters work during a day, the more prospective high-tech candidates they reach out to, thus the better the odds of finding that perfect IT consultant for our clients.

In addition to hard work (and dedication – which goes hand in hand), successful IT staffing recruiters are also very organized.  Technical recruiters can talk to hundreds of candidates each day.  However, if they can’t organize themselves, and find the candidates in the future, what good does it do?

Strong IT recruiters are articulate and well-spoken (especially in the current email age).

Finally, the best IT recruiters Boston treat people the way they would want to be treated in return.  Good IT headhunters call back every candidate and keep people updated or give a courtesy call back when someone is waiting for feedback on any number of IT jobs that he or she interviewed for.

Give any one of our technical recruiters a call today and see if we possess these traits!

Coping with Competitive Atmospheres in the Technical Industry

Technical candidates have a range of company atmospheres that best match their personal comfort levels. Some IT pros prefer finance environments, which tend to be fast-paced & high-stress, while others find working at a nonprofit or educational institution more their preference. Regardless of what point on the scale of competition a company lies on, however, what most companies will have in common is some range of competition – between coworkers, between competitors, or simply as a team effort to achieve company goals. How technical candidates cope with stress will determine whether it drives them forward or holds them back. Technical recruiters, who are familar with coping techniques for stress because the nature of their jobs is high on competition, deadlines & unexpected turns of events, are in an ideal position to advise technical candidates entering a potentially stressful work environment on best managing within the atmosphere.

Technical Career Development

Technical candidates can make use of a variety of tools as they seek to map map out a path to career advancement. Technical professional development can happen through membership in a technical organization, through networking with other technical professionals, or through mentorship. Technical recruiting companies can provide key tools to technical candidates to facilitate their potential for success. Among the interview prep services an IT staffing firm can provide to boost a talented technical candidate’s chances of interview success is interviewing role play. Especially for technical positions that involve a phone screen & face-to-face interview stage, a technical recruiter willing to guide a technical candidate through a practice run of each type of interview will have a much higher chance of placing a solid candidate than IT recruiter who preps a technical candidate minimally.

When IT recruiters coach technical candidates for interviews, they should be sure to cover several main topics. Environment is key subject for a technical recruiter to go in-depth on, as a candidate who is technically proficient, but not a culture fit won’t pass final interviewing rounds. Another often overlooked, but significant factor to familiarize a technical candidate with is the company’s organizational structure, and more importantly, the hierarchy structure of the specific company group the technical candidate would be working with. Sample interview questions will also help a technical candidate to formulate answers that are concise & consistent – crucial for a good interviewing “story”. Reviewing common questions such as inquiries about long-term goals will help a candidate respond effortlessly when the real deal comes around. Finally, a little positive encouragement never hurt anyone’s interviewing chances! Letting a candidate know they’re a natural fit for the role (if it’s your genuine opinion) & that they’re in a great position to perform to win during the interview will be a plus for a technical candidate & IT recruiters’ chances of a successful placement.