Monthly Archives: September 2013

“Fall” Into Your IT Job Search

IT recruiters and IT contractors are just beginning to dive into fall job searching after the slower, vacation-addled Summer season.  IT professionals searching for new IT jobs can certainly expect to find IT headhunters and IT managers with arms wide open in a great candidates’ market.  It seems that a few factors will be driving growth in the Information Technology sector this Fall:

  1. Companies have been trying to make do with fewer employees and fewer resources for too long.  This Fall they will begin to finally hire and fill some of the positions they may have been trying to combine or divvy and thrust upon some employees. Understaffed companies will swing open doors to IT consultants as they expand to a more comfortable number of employees.
  2. The economy is obviously recovering slowly, but IT is certainly one sector that is growing faster.  Maintaining an enviable 3% unemployment rate over the last quarter or so, things will only get better as the economy as a whole recovers.

Introverts in IT

Information technology is a field that draws an unprecedented number of introverted IT consultants and IT managers.  The long hours alone by a computer screen certainly appeal to a great number of IT professionals.  This high concentration of introverts makes Susan Cain’s research on how to utilize them in the workplace particularly relevant to the field and IT staffing firms and IT headhunters.

Cain’s research suggests a few tweaks to current corporate practice.  Firstly, instead of overlooking quiet, introverted types for leadership positions and jobs in general, it is best to delve deeper and look for the ideas and creativity they can provide.  Secondly, Cain considers the standard corporate practice of celebrating, and generally forcing, extroversion, to be counterproductive.  It makes working difficult for the 33 to 50% of the population that tends to be more introverted than extroverted.

These changes could certainly start with IT recruiting agencies, which might be more likely to overlook quiet IT job candidates. The IT headhunters who work directly with candidates can advocate for them as alternatives to the typical extroverts they might be drawn to.  Taking more time to consider the introverted candidate could make IT staffing agencies instrumental in Cain’s ‘Quiet Revolution.’