IT pros not lacking for employment, but may need to move

The government is cutting back on IT recruitment and so are communications companies, but job prospects across the IT industry as a whole rose on the back of a recruitment boom in software houses, says a report from CWJobs. Adverts for permanent IT jobs in the public sector are down 40 per cent since last year as part of the …

[Anonymous Coward]

Lies, Damned Lies & Statistics

I don't doubt for one minute that there are jobs out there; I suspect that there may be more people offering jobs. But I will say that using the Job Boards as a means of measurement of job availibility is not the most accurate way of calculating vacancies or skills required..

I've noticed that a number of jobs are duplicated on the various job boards; many times the same vacancy is offered by more than one recruiter. In some cases, a job is advertised, and then appears again at a slightly later date, in some cases multiple times. There have also been a growing number of recruiters that place ads "trawling" for active job seekers; once they have your name and skills, they mass mail businesses with these details, trying to find suitable vacancies that they were not previously aware of to earn commission.

On top of that, recruiters are notoriously poor at identifying what skill sets are really required by their customers. I think most of them must have a set of tickboxes with acronyms, and when they do talk to the customer, they just tick some of the boxes without actually trying to identify if that particular item is really what is needed. If the customer highlights something that's not on their list, they just select a box at random.

Just call me Mr Cynical; I've been looking for a new job for the last year. Anon because otherwise I think I might just end up with the opportunity to spend more time looking for a new job.

[Sir Runcible Spoon]

Sir

I can agree with you about recruiters, or even clients, not really knowing what they're asking for.

Last year I saw a position that only required two main qualifications: CCNA & CISSP

Talk about asking for a CSE and a Degree.

[weenoid]

Spot on

When I applied for my current position the recruitment agency guy gave me a short technical interview over the phone. It was pretty easy as he understood neither the questions nor the answers. I just assured him I was correct.

[Anonymous Coward]

I totally agree I have started to look for a new job about a month ago and I had 3 interviews, in I have not succeeded and the other one is still ongoing. After that I have replied to 26 ads from those 3 were for different positions all others were for the same things had already been for the interview.

For each vacancy there are at least (at least on my personal experience) 4 to 6 agencies placing ads for that hence there is an enormous amount of replication so the results should be normalized by a factor of at leas 3 or 4.

I also agree that the IT recruitment people lack the basic understanding of what is needed for a role plus the job specs requirements do not reflect what is going to be required in reality.

[Richard Wharram]

Many large companies are laying off permies and then immediately taking on contractors to replace them. Great times :)

[Anonymous Cowerd]

not if you're a permie

besides, wouldn't that be illegal, as you can't make a position redundant and then employ someone else to do it?

[Richard Wharram]

I was a permie.

Not illegal at all if done in the right way.

[Anonymous Coward]

Well this is what Shaw did in Canada.

They laid off most of the staff and offered to re-hire them for less wages.

The job description was just slightly changed to keep it legal.

So basically they had a choice to do the same job for less wages.

[Richard Wharram]

This isn't how it's working over here. Permies on normal wages are being replaced with contractors on phat rates.

[Yag]

"contractors on phat rates."

Don't forget to add that the phat rates are paid to the contracting firm... The contracting guy himself only get 1/5 of the money.

[Richard Wharram]

Can't comment on individual cases but in general the contractors are doing very nicely.

[ph0b0s]

Infrasture details

As someone who works on the infrastructure side (network engineer) I say thanks for all the stats about programming roles. Very useful....

[Kirbini]

Where's the rest?

Not everyone in IT writes code you know. Where's the numbers for the rest of us?

[Anonymous Coward]

"IT pros not lacking for employment, but may need to move" - who gains?

Oh look, it'll be the people who wrote the report - MDR63.

[Sir Runcible Spoon]

Sir

Whilst Software Programmers are IT professionals, IT professionals != Software Programmers.

[Anonymous Coward]

Language,

Language,

Language,

Buzzword,

Language

FFS. It's hard enough for professionals to keep up to date with their own languages without having to keep track of the bullshit buzzword bingo employed by recruiters.