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 THE STAT 26Percentage of wireless customers who use their cell phones to take picturesMore Vitals
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FEBRUARY 4, 2004
Tech Hiring: No Longer an Oxymoron The worst of times seems to be over as an uptick in IT spending spurs recruitment, especially for the experienced and the versatile Something unusual is going on at tech-consulting outfit DiamondCluster International, headquartered in Chicago's landmark John Hancock Center: It's hiring. The furloughs and pay cuts of the Internet bust are behind it, and DiamondCluster plans to bring on more than 100 full-time consultants in 2004 to help its clients, mainly insurance and financial-services companies, make the most of their technology. That's a four-fold increase over last year, says Pete Pesce, whose title is chief people officer. He adds: "Business is stronger." That's the word, at last, from many of the headhunters and corporate staffing chiefs who hire tech professionals. Stoking the demand is the long-awaited uptick in information-technology purchases as businesses finally start to replace aging gear. Tech outfits need pros who can design and sell the new goods. Buyers will be looking for experts who know how to choose the right technology -- and make it work. The upturn may not amout to a boom in either tech spending or hiring, but "we're having more conversations with clients about growth strategies," Pesce says. "TURNED FOR THE BETTER." During the layoff frenzy of the last three years, tech workers were hit harder than most as customers atoned for their IT-spending excesses of the late 1990s. That has about run its course, says Scot Melland, chief executive of Dice, the largest online job board for technology professionals. New York-based Dice now lists about 33,000 jobs, nearly a 50% increase from the same time last year, Melland says. "We're not in the heydays [of the last decade], but the market has definitely turned for the better," he adds. Job hunters feel their luck is turning as well. Tom Denegre, a tech marketing and sales exec who has been searching for a permanent job for 16 months after being laid off from a Cincinnati software concern, made ends meet in 2003 by working contract jobs. Last year, he mailed more than 600 résumés but landed only two interviews. "It was a dead market," says the former Navy pilot who has an MBA and an extensive background in technology. "You got no feedback from recruiters. No one was hiring." This year, he says, recruiters are starting to call him. "And employers are finally picking up the phone," he adds. "You can really sense the difference." STILL SPOTTY. Eric Wheel of Princeton Search Group in Mill Valley, Calif., is an executive recruiter who specializes in finding tech execs for Silicon Valley companies. He says after a "terrible year" in 2003, more than 50% of his strongest candidates are juggling multiple offers. Better yet, he adds, these are new jobs, not just hires to fill long-open slots: "This is expansion hiring." Still, such hiring will likely be more spotty than broad-based. And employers probably won't extend many job offers until they're certain that demand has picked up. After all, the U.S. economy added a measly 1,000 jobs last December, a far cry from the 200,000 positions a month U.S. Treasury Secretary John Snow predicted in October, 2003. In a recent Morgan Stanley survey, some 225 chief information officers in the nation's 1,000 largest companies said they expect IT staffing at their businesses to be flat to down this year. One reason tech hiring may remain in check is the growing trend of sending jobs such as programming, tech support, and project engineering to lower-wage countries like India. Some 200,000 to 300,000 jobs could end up being shipped offshore this year, predicts Peter Cohan, a management consultant in Marlborough, Mass., who has studied the phenomenon. Many proponents of "offshoring" say the threat to U.S. workers is overblown and that the practice will ultimately lead to the creation of higher-skilled jobs in the U.S. But Cohan remains skeptical. "The tech job market tends to very specialized," Cohan says. "It's not always as easy as it sounds for people to retrain."
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