More signs of IT recovery

The IT employment market is changing and CTOs must stand up and take notice. For most of the time I’ve been writing this column for InfoWorld, I’ve been writing for CTOs in a down market. On occasion, I’ve offered a ray of false hope to my fellow CTOs based on a gut-level optimism that didn’t pan out. But this time my sense that we’ve turned a corner isn’t based on hope alone. I’m starting to see some tangible, positive signs in the IT employment market, even within my own company. To quote Bob Dylan, you don’t need a weather vane to know which way the wind blows. After having the wind in our faces for the past three years, we might finally be getting a little at our backs.

IT is and will likely remain a challenging field in which to find work, but several unscientific indicators indicate an uptick. After providing a reference for someone every few months during the downturn, I am providing substantially more frequent references for former colleagues these days. During the downturn, I knew several top-notch IT professionals who were unable to find work. That number is getting really low these days.

I’m also getting more of those aggravating calls from developer “body shops” trying to place .Net developers before asking me whether we are actually a .Net shop (we aren’t). Best of all, though, I am adding the first real person to my staff since I joined InfoWorld slightly more than three years ago. Granted, this is a temporary six-month position that reflects some general timidity in the market, but it’s still expansion. I’ve done some replacement hiring during the past few years, but this is the first incremental addition, and it’s really exciting (a kind note to staffing companies: This is not an invitation for you to bombard me with calls — I’m covered).

I write about specific IT issues most of the time in this space, but hiring (although infrequent) is hands down the most important — and most difficult — thing I do. Nothing matters more.

As I began working with our engineering director to get the process under way to hire the new developer, I realized that we had at least one additional tool at our disposal that we didn’t have a few years ago: the critical mass of Weblogs. During the boom, job boards such as Craigslist.org in the Bay Area were the best way to find developers fast, but on the surface, Weblogs seemed to me to be a better recruiting tool. First of all, Weblog subscribers have already shown a clear affinity for your subject matter and even to your personality to a large degree. Second, I thought that the unique way that RSS percolates throughout the blogosphere would help me get the word out to the kind of people who might be interested, and it did.

But after posting to my blog and getting links from a couple of high-traffic blogs, I didn’t get the immediate results I wanted. Various technologies make it easier to get the word out, but no matter what you do, the quest for talent can become only marginally more efficient. No technology will ever replace the hard work of meeting candidates face-to-face and understanding how they will work with the chemistry of your team.

As we enter a new expansion cycle, some things never change. There are no easy ways to find the right people at the right time, but it’s very encouraging to be looking for them nonetheless. Yes, the times they are a-changing.