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Tag Archives: IT recruiting firms

Downplay Money in IT Job Interviews

In interviews for IT jobs, it’s not uncommon to be asked what motivates you.  You may want to tell your IT staffing firms and IT recruiters that you’re looking for a job that makes more.  Making more money isn’t a bad reason to want to switch jobs.  However, you never want to tell hiring managers and interviewers that you’re motivated by money.  Why is this?

Technical recruiters and IT staffing companies understand that making more money can be an important factor in your job hunt.  However, both your IT recruiting companies and your potential employer want to know that you’re interested in the job and the work that you’d do in the role.  If you’re purely motivated by money, it means you’ll always be on the lookout for a new role.  If you’re interested not only in the compensation for the role, but also the role itself, hiring managers will feel more comfortable investing in training and on-boarding you.  Keep this in mind the next time you head to an interview.  Downplaying your interest in compensation and playing up your interest in the role, the work, the company’s culture, etc, will leave a stronger impression on your interviewer—and make it easier for your IT staffing agencies and IT recruiting firms to find you new jobs.

 

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.

 

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!

 

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.

 

The Most Important Part of your LinkedIn Profile When Searching for IT Jobs

When crafting your LinkedIn profile, one of the primary purposes will likely be to attract IT recruiters and IT staffing agencies.  There are a few ways to make your profile more interesting to IT recruiting agencies and IT staffing firms, but one of the best is to make sure you have a great headline.  Since technical recruiters are often sifting through a mass of profiles as they work to fill IT jobs, your best bet is to get their attention quickly, with a concise, powerful headline.

It’s important to note that your LinkedIn profile headline should mention some combination of your strengths, skills, achievements, and interests.  This means that even if you’re currently unemployed, don’t put this in your headline.  IT staffing companies will immediately want to move on to a different profile.  If they’re choosing between IT professionals who can confidently tout their abilities and ones who are unluckily (or worse– deservedly) out of work, it’s a simple decision.  If you want IT recruiting firms to contact you about jobs, make sure your headline emphasizes your strengths, not your current unemployment.

 

How To Tell Interviewers About a Time You Made a Mistake In a Previous IT Job

When you’re booking interviews with IT staffing companies and technical recruiters, there are certain questions you’re probably preparing for and practicing your answers.  If they’re supportive, you may even be working a bit with your IT recruiters and IT staffing agencies to get ready for these IT jobs interviews.  Here’s one question you should definitely prepare for: Tell me about a time you failed or made a mistake at work.

To answer this question in a way that’s advantageous to you and reflects well on you IT recruiting agencies and IT staffing firms, start by making sure you identify a few situations you can talk about.  Check with your IT recruiting companies to make sure these aren’t the kinds of mistakes that would be a big deal in the roles you’re interviewing for.  Particularly when it comes to IT, you don’t want to make yourself look like you’re missing a skill that is needed to support your users, clients, or company’s hardware.

Next, find a way to talk about the mistake in a concise, quick way.  This is the part you want to mention as briefly as possible.  Don’t stop at this point, though.  You want to have most of this answer be about what you learned from the mistake and, if you got to, how you fixed it.  IT recruiting firms place IT professionals who make mistakes all the time.  They’re employable because they learn from these mistakes and can fix them (or mitigate their damage).

 

What to Keep (and Delete) on Your IT Resume

If you’re working on your resume for IT staffing companies and IT recruiters, you may have a hard time deciding what information you should and shouldn’t include on your resume.  While your technical recruiters and IT staffing agencies will be checking over your final resume that they send out for IT jobs, it’s in your best interest to start by sending them your most polished version possible. This means knowing what things to delete and what things to keep.

Something a lot of IT professionals struggle with is whether they should keep or delete their college extracurricular activities—especially fraternities and sororities.  The rule of thumb that IT recruiting firms and IT staffing firms prefer you follow is to only keep things on if you’re a recent college graduate.  If you’ve been out in the IT field (or just the workforce) for more than few years and you’ve had at least one real, professional job, it’s time to take your college extracurriculars off.  Use the space on your resume for professional accomplishments or duties instead.

 

You Need to Prep an Answer to This IT Job Interview Question!

There are a fair amount of standard questions that you can expect to encounter at interviews for IT jobs.  Perhaps your technical recruiters and IT staffing firms will help prepare you for them, or perhaps they’ll simply assume you’re ready to answer them.  Your best bet is to prepare for all standard questions—whether your IT recruiters and IT staffing companies know if they’ll be asked or not.  Here’s one crucial question your IT recruiting agencies will appreciate you preparing for: Why would you succeed in this role?

This might seem like an easy question to answer: just say you have all the skills and experience they require, right?  Not quite.  To prep your answer for this question (or forms of it) start by asking your IT recruiting firms what qualities they think the hiring managers would value most in this position.  Take the time to figure out which ones you can genuinely say you have.  Then, think of stories or achievements that illustrate how you’ve used these qualities.

When you go to answer the question, start by outlining the qualities that will be imperative to success in this role.  Then highlight the qualities you feel you’re especially strong in and quickly provide anecdotes to demonstrate it.  Lastly, if the position covers any work or subject matter you’re particularly passionate about, consider mentioning it to your interviewer.  It will be especially helpful if you have proof of this—perhaps you have been blogging about the topic for a while or volunteer in a relevant capacity.  Combined, these steps will really impress your hiring managers.