The IT jobs market experienced a small upturn in October, according to a survey of recruitment specialists.

After more than a year of falling demand there was a slight higher demand for both permanent and temporary IT workers in October than in the month before.

These findings from the Recruitment Industry Survey, which is produced by the Recruitment and Employment Confederation and KPMG, showed It faired no better than the broader economy.

The survey uses a figure to represent demand, where anything above 50 indicates growth on the previous month.

For permanent IT jobs, the figure in October was 51.5, indicating a very marginal growth on the previous month. Two months ago in August, the figure was 44.8, a slide in the number of posts available from July.

But the fall had been at its worst in March, when the figure for permanent staff was 31.9, one of the most severe declines in the history of the report.

Temporary staff positions also grew last month, producing a figure of 53.8. This compared to a figure of 46.6 in August.

All sectors experienced some growth, except for secretarial Read more…

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In this latest Hiring Manager interview, Joseph Seibert, the senior vice president and CIO of The New York Times Company, counsels job seekers on how they can make great first impressions with their resumes and during job interviews. He also offers hiring managers advice based on the lesson he learned from his biggest hiring mistake.

When it comes to hiring staff for his technology department, Joseph Seibert has a soft spot for candidates who are underdogs. He admires IT professionals who’ve charged ahead in their careers despite starting at a disadvantage.

In the past, Seibert has grown so excited about an underdog’s personality that he says he has made the mistake of advancing a candidate through the interview process who had a great story but who was not right for the job. Seibert, now senior vice president and CIO of The New York Times Company, says the lesson he’s learned from that mistake is to know himself: to be aware of his tendency to get excited and to keep his excitement in check so that it doesn’t undermine his effort to hire the best person for the job. It’s practiced advice that all hiring managers can benefit from.

Job seekers can benefit from Seibert’s advice, too. In this latest Hiring Manager interview, Seibert describes the mistakes IT professionals make on their résumés and during job interviews that kill their chances of wooing employers. He spoke with CIO.com about his hiring practices and how the transformation of the media industry is affecting IT staffing at The New York Times Company.

Sarah Mitchell: How are the challenges facing the news industry affecting your hiring?

Joseph Seibert: The news industry is transforming. Traditional print and media organizations have to become multi-channel distributors of news and information, including digital channels, such as websites, blogs, iPhones, cell phones and BlackBerries. I was hired to transform the technology organization so that it has the right structure, skills and capabilities to support multi-channel distribution.

The technology organization is extremely important to this overall transformation, and it is very important that I get the right structure and the right people within that structure who understand multi-channel distribution, digital technology and traditional technologies. I need leaders who have worked in some type of media, including a pretty sizable digital environment, and who can work amidst transformation and uncertainty. They must know how to build the infrastructure that provides speed-to-market, flexibility, and that supports those many channels efficiently and effectively.

What organizational changes have you made to the Read more…

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Research from Challenger, Gray & Christmas shows employers are planning to replenish their workforce as the economic recovery gets underway.

Employers could be filling IT positions in the coming months, research suggests, as the number of positions expected to be created could begin to outpace anticipated job cuts in some industries.

Hiring budgets could be coming out of the deep freeze initiated at the start of the economic recession, according to industry watchers. Outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas reports that employers in September began to detail plans to hire more workers than they did in 2008. Through September 2009, employers have announced plans to hire 169,385 workers this year, marking an 88% increase over the nearly 90,000 planned hires announced in the first three quarters of 2008. The sectors planning the most hires include the retail, government and nonprofit, and enterprise and leisure industries.

Employers in the telecommunications industry announced 6,339 planned hires for 2009, compared to 2,689 last year. Aerospace and defense employers intend to add 2,618 new position, less than the 4,709 in the previous year. Electronics companies are expecting to add 1,765 new jobs, another decline from 2008’s 3,013 planned positions. E-commerce vendors reported they would augment staff with 1,572 new openings, an increase over the 500 added in 2008. And while the computer industry reportedly announced 7,717 new hires, the data Challenger, Gray & Christmas tracked so far this year shows the industry isn’t planning any new hires so far in 2009.

“These figures represent just a tiny fraction of the hiring and available jobs out there. We track hiring announcements,” said John Challenger, CEO at the outplacement firm, in a statement.

20 most useful career sites for IT professionals

Challenger, Gray & Christmas also cited recent Bureau of Labor Statistics data that showed 2.4 million job openings as of August, down from 3.9 million in 2008. And the same government agency reported that 4 million workers were hired in August, despite the unemployment rate nearing 10%.

“There is no doubt that this is a tight job market. There simply are more job seekers than there are jobs. However, it would be a mistake to assume that no one is hiring,” Challenger said.

Separately, IT research firm Foote Partners also found cause for optimism in recent government statistics. David Foote, CEO and chief research officer, said in a statement that while high-tech industry segments have been posting job losses, they are losing fewer jobs and in some cases adding positions. For instance, “five IT bellwether job segments” have posted collective job losses of between 4,000 and 11,000 jobs each month (including 4,300 lost in August), but also showed gains such as 7,400 positions in Read more…

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The hiring process in most companies is built backwards. Take a tour of the hiring process for almost any company in the United States, and what you see will look something like this:

Post job requirements.
Collect resumes.
Throw away any resumes that don’t satisfy all the bullet points.
Call the people whose resumes remain and put them through a test intended to determine whether they lied about those bullet points.
Send those who didn’t appear to lie to a final interview.
Hire those who don’t annoy you.
The problem here is, for the most part, related to steps 1 and 4. Employers put the cart before the horse, sorting for people who seem to already know how to do the job, but will require retraining anyway because no two work environments are going to be identical. This is true of any job from janitorial services to software engineering.

A better way to handle it is to pare those job requirements down to a minimal set of fundamentals (skills unrelated to the job itself, but necessary to understand the job), and defer the rest for preferential interviewing and training. Instead of setting “six years J2EE experience” as a minimum requirement, try “understands, and can demonstrate, basic programming skills.” Instead of “Bachelor’s Degree required; Computer Science preferred,” try “willing and able to learn.”

When it comes to testing, most HR departments put together a set of technology familiarity questions, such as: “Using a mouse, what series of steps would you use to change the IP address on Windows XP?” I actually faced that specific question myself when applying for a job well below my skill level, but couldn’t recall the exact sequence of clicks needed to get there at that moment. Instead, make the first interview an informal discussion with someone within the company that actually understands the job at hand. Do you remember, with perfectly clarity, the exact set of clicks you need to go through to change the IP address on Windows XP? Is there some reason that opening a cmd window and using ipconfig is unacceptable? Would someone in HR be able to determine a correct answer other than the one listed in the answer key?

Aside from coördination, HR departments are generally woefully underequipped to manage the hiring process for skilled workers. For technical jobs, the phrase “it takes one to know one” is both true and important. Just as with simple plurality voting, where each person gets exactly one vote in a potential cast of thousands, the cookie-cutter approach to applicant evaluation used by most HR departments is prone to artificially and inefficiently narrowing the field so that the chances of getting the best candidate for the job is actually unlikely.

This is especially problematic in the field of security, where satisfying bullet point requirements for experience and education is nowhere near as important as being able to think through the ramifications of policy decisions. Cookie-cutter application evaluation based on education and experience bullet points is more likely to net you a “security expert” who is merely an expert in security software vendors than in developing and implementing secure business policy.

For best results, hire your security experts based on their aptitudes and reasoning abilities more than their ability to select “best practices” based on multiple-choice vertically integrated vendor stack selection that conforms to current trends. Learn the lessons of How do you interview security experts?, and expect most of the practical skills to come from on-the-job training rather than arbitrary standards of “higher education” indoctrination and years in similar jobs under dissimilar conditions.

An example of a company that appears to “get it” is Jane Street Capital. The Desired Skill Set listing for JSC is strong in aptitudes, attitudes, and potentials, and says nothing about years of experience in similar jobs or specific degree requirements. The Education page at the JSC site explains what is expected of employees, and how ongoing education in the skills pertinent to the job — both as students and as educators — is the key to competence and advancement. In short, Jane Street Capital appears to be dedicated to creating the best possible employees, rather than expecting to find them sprung whole from the forehead of Zeus by checking to see who fits Read more…

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Despite the economic downturn, IT departments are still struggling with a “significant” skills gap, according to new research from accounting and consulting firm Deloitte.

It carried out a global survey of 306 IT decision-makers and executive business managers, and found that while IT bosses have an increasingly clear understanding of what they must do to effectively support their organisations’ business strategies, their existing IT talent strategies and programs appear to be falling short, leaving IT departments without the talent necessary to do the job.

The research showed that the majority of survey respondents (51 percent) strongly believe talent issues have limited their organisation’s productivity and efficiency. Half admitted that the talent shortage is limiting their ability to innovate.

In addition, a significant number of respondents indicated that IT talent issues are having a material impact on other key dimensions of business success – growth (58 percent), speed to market (54 percent), quality (53 percent) and customer relationships (53 percent).

The also showed that the vast majority of IT organisations expect to expand their workforces over the next three-to-five years. 47 percent said that they expect to see at least 5 percent annual growth in the IT workforce over that period – even as the pool of experienced and qualified IT workers in many countries gets smaller.

“Even in the midst of hiring freezes and layoffs, organisations continue to face talent shortages in critical areas such as IT,” said Jeff Schwartz, principal at Deloitte Consulting in a statement.

“We believe differentiation is key when trying to attract, develop and retain top IT talent. This means organisations will need to revitalize their efforts and focus on areas such as company brand, workforce flexibility, multi-generation workforce strategies, job rotations, Read more…

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Based on a poll in a September report on jobs and technology job hunting, a good number of job seekers discount the value of recruiters in getting a new job. A closer look at the daily frustrations of managing recruiters for IT workers reveals what is and is not working for them.

Maybe all it takes is one or two bad experiences with an inexperienced recruiter with very little technology knowledge to get under the skin of tech job seekers. Maybe it’s all those unsolicited e-mails and phone calls. Maybe they just feel like a flock of mosquitoes, trying to pinch a little bit of your blood and soul while you are simply trying to manage the day to day of your job. Perhaps it’s as simple as you haven’t found a recruiter you can honestly trust.

What else would explain nearly 40 percent of respondents to a recent Dice poll saying that recruiters were a waste of time? Dice is a technology job board that is widely used by companies, recruiting agencies and independent recruiters looking to find the right match for open positions.

“While 39 percent is certainly a large proportion, it means 61 percent see at least some of the value recruiters bring to a job search: Twenty-eight percent said they got a job through a recruiter, 23 percent have gone to interviews set up by a recruiter, and 10 percent have gotten a contract position through one,” writes Dice Senior Vice President and CMO Tom Silver.

It’s no doubt that it’s in Dice’s best interest to talk about the value of recruiting, as it clearly does in The Dice Report for September. It certainly begs the question: Are recruiters really a bad use of your time?

Ok, yes, the majority still sees some value in recruiters. However, what Silver and Dice do not examine in any detail in the report is why that 39 percent want nothing or little to do with them. Dice would not need to look that far to see the headaches technology job seekers go through with recruiters.

In a Dice forum thread with the subject “Anyone else sick of recruiters?” you find a plethora of bitching, of course, but also of real experiences that burned people and also some more measured reactions.

Here are a few with a more measured tone:

From the contributor “vmunix”:

“It’s gotten so bad, I honestly don’t return 90% of the emails I get about jobs. Or calls. I have a very wide range of skills, combined with some very unique skills that are depressingly high in demand.

I say depressingly high because they result in a lot of garbage resume farmers from India pestering me about jobs it should be blatantly clear I have no interest in. See my name? Now, why on earth would I want to talk to somebody about a Windows NT 4 PDC to Active Directory migration?

Or my location preferences. It’s pretty clear; there are three places in the country I am interested in. Or straight telecommute. So of course, I get tons of recruiters asking if I’d be interested in a job in a completely different locale, which is so junior to me as to be nearly an insult.

(EDIT TIME!)
That said so far, I do have to admit, I’ve had the pleasure of working with some EXCELLENT recruiters and agencies. NOTHING pisses me off more than a brainless recruiter who has NO idea what it is that I do trying to tell me what it is that I do. But I’ve had a few from firms both large and small that were decent enough to come right Read more…

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Back in April, I wrote about the despicable practice of fake job postings. These are “employment” ads that end up being nothing more than come-ons from career-marketing services that can charge up to $10,000.

Now there appear to be more people seeking to make a profit off of job seekers: Recruiters selling your resume to other recruiters or companies.

Apparently people post fake job ads to garner 1,000 or more resumes and then sell those resumes to other recruiters.

Larry Chaffin, writing in a blog for NetworkWorld, did an experiment to check this story out. He and some partners created three fake resumes from a CIO-type to an entry-level employee. He explained,

“We looked at the positions that stated remote position\work from home office with a national telecommunication company or Fortune 100 companies. Also we applied for architect, engineer, and executive jobs as well. We applied for around 70 jobs and on some of them we made sure we had the experience they wanted. Being just right or over qualified you would think we Read more…

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Unfortunately, many clients lament that hiring a consultant is a gamble. They often feel like they don’t have enough real information to assess candidates, so they pin the tail on a consultant and hope their project gets completed competently and on time.

To convince potential clients that you are the right person for the project, you can stand out by presenting a slew of great recommendations. However, you need to know how to ask for them from former clients. This requires you to stay on top of your relationship with all your former clients, never letting them forget who you are and what a great job you’ve done for them.

I’ll tell you how to approach clients to provide the kinds of references to help you win the next project and assure potential clients of your quality work.

Obtain a letter of recommendation

My favorite reference is a letter of recommendation that I include in a Recommendations (not References) section of my portfolio. This type of recommendation carries several benefits:

Potential clients don’t have to make phone calls to learn what former clients think about the work I’ve done. Of course, I also tell clients that — upon request — I can provide contact information for recommendations.

Recommendations immediately show my work has benefited previous clients; I don’t have to hope that Human Resources calls my references and then passes on accurate information to the person doing the hiring.
Over time, the number of accumulated recommendations becomes quite impressive. Anyone can come up with one or two decent letters, but clients can’t ignore five, 10, or more.
For these reasons, I ask every one of my clients to write a letter of recommendation instead of simply being a reference. A benefit for the former clients is that writing such a letter reduces the number of phone calls they receive from future clients, which is important when you take on several projects in a year. Reducing the number of calls also means they’ll be more likely to hand out glowing references to the occasional caller.

Write your own?

Don’t be surprised if clients ask you to write the letter Read more…

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Staffing company Accountemps released research last week on this topic. When hiring executives were asked about resume typos:

23% of those surveyed said just one typo is enough to send the resume to the trash heap.
Two typos and 28% of them are pulling the trigger.
A piece on the site Working.com gives some examples of bloopers from real-life resumes:

“I am attacking my resume for you to review.”
“I have a keen eye for derail.”
“Hope to hear from you, shorty.”
Spell-check will most likely not catch these bloopers because the words are spelled correctly, but the words are not in the right context.

So what can you do to avoid these embarrassing blunders? Read more…

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