If you read the various recruiting blogs it becomes clear there is an ongoing competition for talent – a war, if you will. It doesn’t matter if we’re in a recession; talented engineers will always be in demand.
What does this mean to you as a candidate? It might seem sometimes there are many more applicants than jobs out there. Perhaps you, or someone you know, have been conducting an extended job search with little result. You might wonder, and rightly so -- if there’s a war for talent, why am I not seeing it?
The issue is that the job market in 2008 is significantly different from what it was in 1999, or even back in 1995. It has become a lot more stratified. Although there is still a lot of demand for technical talent, companies have become a lot more selective in their hiring.
The saying back in 1999-2000 was that if you could fog a mirror you could get a tech job. That’s not far from the truth; I recall back then how desperate my employer was in trying to get people onboard. We used to hire barely qualified people hoping they would improve and develop into better engineers over time.
The dot com bust of 2001-2004 shook out the industry and put an end to that kind of rampant indiscriminate hiring. Companies nowadays realize that in order to build and maintain large, complex systems you need solid, experienced engineers. You might be able to keep basic CRUD systems running with mediocre people, but to architect and build sophisticated, cutting edge systems you need top shelf talent. And companies are now less willing to train people or wait for them to develop and blossom.
Not only that, but since 2001 there is a whole new set of skills in demand, at least in my world. ASP.NET, C#, .NET CLR, etc. all came onto the scene around late 2001, and only a limited population of engineers is competent with these ‘current’ skills. And guess what – in addition to my company, all the other companies that use .NET are trying to hire those candidates as well.
So to bring this discussion back around to you, the candidate – it means that if you have the right skills, and can show that you have those skills, you will be a hot commodity. However, if you don’t have the necessary skills, you might find the market to be just as cool as it was back in 2001 after the dot com bust. So you need to do what you can to make your skills current and relevant.
And what does this mean to the hiring companies? It means that finding (and keeping) the right talent is now more important than ever, and perhaps more difficult than ever. In many ways the competition resembles the 1999-2000 environment, only now you’ll have to be more selective, and you’ll need to make a stronger case as to why candidates should work for your company.
3 comments:
Hello,
From reading your post, I have another suggestion as to why you may be having difficulty finding quality applicants while there is an apparent over-supply of labor in the field.
Perhaps you will be able to find more qualified applicants if you changed criteria. Currently you appear to be looking for specific skillsets (.NET).
As you reference in your post, the tools of the day change. If you are hiring an employee for the long run instead of a contractor for the short term, it is more important that you find someone who can adapt with the company as your technology changes as opposed to one who will be able to help in the short term but an unknown ability in the future.
Instruction of employees is required. An engineer with a solid foundation is often able to learn and produce a solution (and have that solution maintained) for less than the cost of hiring a less skilled engineer with more experience on the specific technology.
You can do well to cut into the shortage of labor if you are willing to increase your risk and spend more effort up front.
The potential benefits are directly proportional to the risk.
We have indeed started to broaden our search, which I'll blog about in a future post. However, there has to be a balance between getting skilled/experienced candidates and those with good potential. Right now, for better or for worse, most companies are leaning towards the skilled/experienced side of that equation.
Call this behavior short sighted if you will, but it might have something to do with the weak economy. When things aren't so good, companies tend to cut back on training and are less likely to take chances on unproven talent. Those candidates may need time to ramp up, costing the company money.
randommanager:
It seems that in very few cases can a candidate join an environment and immediatly be as productive as a real employee. Such an expectation is unrealistic.
I couldn't find a citation on the topic quickly, but general wisdom is to expect lowered productivity for 90 days.
It takes much less time for a skilled employee to come up to speed with a new technology. This is particularly true when there is an organizational infastructure in place to assist in that training.
In your response, you characterized looking for someone without the specific technologies as "broaden"-ing your search. I don't know your case, but in most cases that would not be an accurate characterization.
I believe that in many cases, companies do not have an idea of what they actually need. Creating a technology-based skill invintory is a symptom of this.
Anyway, I'll save discussion of job requirements for when you post on that.
For this post, my point is that simply it is more cost effective to hire and teach exceptional engineers than it would be to hire only those who meet the skill list.
I don't doubt that many companies have sub-optimal human resource practices. I haven't found any companies (aside from a press-release that google does) in which the companies take a evidence-based approach to hiring.
And thats a shame.
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