IT Recruiters Rocking Out– and Networking in Austin
An IT recruiter and a music lover walk into a bar. No, it’s not a joke, it’s happening in Austin this year– over and over again– at the highly-anticipated music festival South by Southwest. While South by Southwest (often lovingly referred to by insiders as SXSW) the festival has become an increasingly popular haven for IT recruiting firms and IT consultants. New technology is being marketed in the midst of what used to be a particularly grassroots musical festival, making it suddenly surprisingly relevant to the IT recruiting agencies across the nation, from IT recruiters CA to IT recruiters Boston. IT staffing firms will find not only the place where indie artists like Bon Iver got their starts, but their next IT jobs or IT contractors to fill them.
SXSW 2013 will likely feature plenty of 3-D printing-oriented businesses for IT staffing agencies to peruse, as well as some involving space travel and wearable electronics. IT recruiting companies may want to leave their nice briefcases at home, though. No matter how much the information technology field is invading it, SXSW is still a gritty music festival at heart.
Not Optional: Bring Your Own Questions to IT interviews
IT staffing firms often prepare IT consultants to answer tough, detailed questions that you’d only encounter in the information technology field. Technical recruiters Boston should be equally focused on making sure that IT contractors interviewing for IT jobs are able to ask their own questions. IT recruiting companies need their job candidates to answer questions for a few different reasons. The first is to give the impression that IT professionals have their own, independent thought process. Critical thinking is an imperative skill that can be put on resumes, but IT staffing companies are much better served when a job candidate verbally demonstrates critical thinking abilities. Secondly, IT recruiting agencies need job candidates to ask questions so they can indicate that a true engagement and interest in the job. Not asking questions could easily translate to a disinterest in a job or company, leaving job candidates and their IT recruiting firms left out of the running to fill a position.
What are the best kinds of questions for IT staffing agencies to prepare their job candidates to ask? Questions could be about the culture of a company, what a typical day looks like for the person who will fill the position in question, or why the position has become available. IT headhunters can also encourage their candidates to inquire about management styles, how much or little team-work is required, and what kind of person they have worked best with previously. One major area to stay away from, however, is compensation. IT recruiters add an extra layer of complication to the mix and IT job candidates generally makes an interviewer uncomfortable when they bring up compensation before an offer is made.
Education is Working Now to Change the IT Market of the Future
IT recruiting firms are well-aware of the disparity between the IT jobs available in the US and the number of people who actually study and graduate with the right training to be IT professionals. Everyone knows Math and Science need some heavy promotion among students, but few know it on the kind of practical level that IT staffing firms do. Every time technical recruiters attempt to fill IT jobs and see how few US citizens’ resumes meet the requirements, they see firsthand the way US schools have not promoted Math and Science. Enter Code.org.
Code.org may very well change the pool of IT contractors that IT recruiting companies choose from. With its exciting, celebrity-laden video and solid, well-researched missing, code.org may bring computer coding to more of today’s students, propelling them into the hands of IT staffing firms of the future. Of course, Code.org is not the only proponent of increasing US proficiency in skills viable for the information technology field. Obama is an outspoken champion of Math and Science in schools and brings many other voices with him in his rallying cry. Though it might take some time for all this advocacy to actually bear any fruit, IT staffing agencies will almost certainly see more US IT consultants and they can work with in the future.