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Tag Archives: IT staffing agencies

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.

 

White House Hacking Gives us Hints for Future IT Job Market

IT recruiters and IT staffing companies have known for a while that security is a hot area for IT jobs.  As people become more and more reliant on technology in daily life and business, hackers and cyberattacks become more and more common.  Technical recruiters and IT staffing firms have even more proof now that security is a very high priority area in tech.  Recently, the White House announced that Russian hackers accessed White House emails, information, and potentially some sensitive information of American citizens. 

With a high profile target like the White House, it’s obvious that there are more resources and IT professionals urgently needed to defend America’s digital property and interests.  If you’re searching for IT jobs, it’s worth noting that more and more IT recruiting agencies and IT staffing agencies will be seeking candidates with skills in security. Building up or acquiring applicable skills for security jobs will be a very worthy investment.     

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!

 

Education, Privacy, and IT: A Conversation that’s Just Getting Started

As IT recruiters and IT staffing companies continue to find IT jobs flooding their inboxes and IT pervades most aspects of life, one question becomes more urgent: How do we deal with the legal quandaries of an IT-centric world?  One area where this is of particular concern is in education.  More IT in education has a lot of positive effects: it creates new jobs for technical recruiters and IT staffing firms to fill, new opportunities for students, and cheaper and more environmentally friendly materials for students and teachers.  It also creates some questions about the privacy of the students, especially the younger students, who use this technology.

Recently, the US government has stepped in with some progress towards dealing with these issues.  Since IT won’t get any less pervasive in education in the future, new bills are being created.  The Student Digital Privacy and Parental Rights Act of 2015 is one of the first bills to address these issues.  The bill suggests a few ways that student information should be made available and unavailable to parents and tech companies.  Though the bill seems unlikely to pass, especially in this first draft, IT professionals, IT recruiting companies, and IT staffing agencies will continue to see more legislation proposed to protect student privacy.  This bill is only the start of a long conversation to come—one that involves the IT field, Education, and the government.

 

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.

 

How to Describe Yourself in IT Job Interviews

Sometimes in interviews for IT jobs, you’ll be asked to describe yourself.  Even if you don’t prepare for this question with your IT recruiters and IT staffing companies, you can have a basic idea of how to respond.  Here are some guidelines for how to formulate this answer so that you do you technical recruiters and IT recruiting firms proud.

1. Don’t use words to describe yourself that are very obviously matters of opinion.  For instance, don’t call yourself bright, smart, well-liked, likable, successful, etc.  This only tells your interviewer that you think you’re smart.  Since most IT professionals probably believe this about themselves, that doesn’t really set you apart.  Use this question to give concrete achievements, anecdotes, or to demonstrate that you’ve got a great process for problem-solving, troubleshooting, etc.  This is the kind of thing that impresses hiring managers and IT staffing agencies.

2. Don’t call yourself obsessive, a perfectionist, or some other false “flaw”. Now is the time to be honest and straightforward.  Coyly praising yourself will just waste time and frustrate the interviewer. It’s also a much overused strategy, which will just feel meaningless to a hiring manager. Use your interview time wisely and IT recruiting companies will be happy to set you up for interviews.

3. Do try to incorporate a quality or two that you know the interviewing company values.  If you know a company values efficiency and you can legitimately say that you’re great at getting things done quickly, it will help to note that.  Try to have a quick story or two to back up these statements, too!