Tech-Pro in the Star Tribune!

Tech-Pro was mentioned this past Sunday in the Star Tribune on an article focusing on the IT Job Outlook in 2009. I was fortunate enough to have collaborated with both Laura French and Rick Deare on this article. You can check it out here: http://tinyurl.com/itjo2009. Laura is a regular contributor to the Star Tribune and has written many excellent articles around the Twin Cities job market!

For those of you that don’t know Rick Deare, he is both a friend and a mentor of mine. Rick is a wildly energetic veteran of the recruiting world that has focused in multiple areas but particularly in the IT world over the past several years. He has an outstanding blog I’d like to promote: http://meettheheadhunter.com/. You can also learn more about his company here: http://www.deare.com/.

Needless to say, I was excited to have even been mentioned in the same article as Rick.

We are certainly starting to see an uptick in the market which is great news. We did grow month over month from January to April which was the first four-month “winning” streak we had seen in some time. While we didn’t place as many consultants in May as April, we also saw a “net gain” in consultants as we placed more people than we had come out of a contract – which is still a positive sign.

The positions we’ve been busiest with have continued to be the more technical ones; particularly development and quality assurance roles. Where we’ve been slow the past 12 months is the project management and business analysis world – though that does seem to be changing. We are hearing about more projects that are “close” to becoming reality that are going to require talented PM’s and BA’s, along with technical professionals of course.

One trend we’ve seen that has REALLY emerged over the past few months is the power of the internal reference. I can cite several times where we’ve presented an OUTSTANDING consultant for a position – not only perfectly qualified for a role, but OVERqualified in most cases – only to lose to another consultant that had appropriate qualifications but also had either prior company experience and/or a strong internal reference inside the group they were interviewing with. This is something that wasn’t necessarily the case a couple of years ago, but it’s almost the norm now. Please keep this in mind when you are vying for a new position – the more internal references you can cite, the better!