Nowadays, the labor market in the IT field is one of the most dynamic and rapidly changing ones. The growing demand for IT services and products throughout the last few years has led to a significant increase in the number of IT companies. The epidemic has only affected this field by challenging the companies to change the work format: until 2022 they were investing in remote and hybrid work settings for their IT workers.
A significant shortage of qualified employees, which has become noticeable in many countries around the world, has led to an increase in wages and other forms of compensation for IT specialists. However, the growing competition and the changing approach to business operations have recently led to firings and a decrease in the number of vacancies in some companies.
Thus, a certain shift in trends and approaches can be observed today in the IT labor market, which requires candidates to find a more flexible and creative approach to job searching and skill development.
Dismissal from work as a form of optimization
The year 2022 has brought a significant amount of layoffs in the largest IT companies. Last November, Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg announced a 13% reduction in the company’s workforce (11,000 employees).
The same month, The New York Times reported that Amazon is downsizing about 10,000 employees. And at the beginning of 2023, they announced that the cut will affect another eight thousand people.
In January of this year, Microsoft also announced the downsizing of 10,000 employees (approximately 5% of the total workforce).
Also in January, Google decided to cut 12,000 jobs worldwide.
Smaller companies experienced huge layoffs as well.
Photo by LYCS Architecture on Unsplash
Experts believe that the mass layoffs in the technology field are the result of a crazy hiring pace during the COVID-19 pandemic. The companies were not ready to return people offline and to support the financial and consumer appetites of their employees, though.
That is, we are talking about cost optimization: “nothing personal”.
Optimizing business processes is one of the key goals of IT company management. In the process of optimization, companies fire some employees to reduce expenses and increase efficiency.
Searching for a job in IT in old and new conditions
There are several traditional approaches to finding a job in the IT field. We’ll be looking at the typical paths for a young specialist who dreams of breaking into this field.
- Sending resumes for job applications is one of the most common ways to find a job. The downside to this approach is that you are dependent on what the employer sees in your resume.
- Posting your resume on job posting websites or mailing it helps employers to find you if they are looking for someone with your skills. The downside of this approach is that you get a lot of job offers that may not meet your expectations.
- Partnering with recruiters: this approach allows you to work with professionals who know about the relevant vacancies and can help you with your interview preparation. However, recruiters may not know all the jobs that match your qualification, and they usually take a percentage of your salary.
The first two options are independent job search, which lets you find vacancies and interact with employers yourself. You can choose vacancies freely and have more control over the process.
Photo by Scott Graham on Unsplash
But it seems that all these methods of job searching are losing their relevance in the new conditions. They do not work!
Optimization is not just a one-time response to the events of the covid era. Optimization is becoming a trend, a principle according to which companies are now staffing.
A huge number of layoffs created a certain inflation in the labor market, so the golden times are coming to an end. Time demands hiring people with the right skillsets at optimized budgets.
Since the number of vacancies is decreasing, but the number of candidates in search is increasing, finding the right specialists becomes an issue of time. Recruiters don’t have this time, since it’s difficult to look through hundreds of resumes just to realize that none of them are suitable. And that is why, for example, the following situations arise: the job search system sees that the candidate has mentioned java in their skills and recommends them for all vacancies where java is required. But maybe java is just a secondary skill for some vacancies. The company may be looking for a graphic designer with minimal knowledge of java for some one-time tasks.
The matrix of competencies as the evolution of the market
To fix this situation and optimize the process, you need to understand that each vacancy is a unique matrix of competencies with unique requirements for candidate’s qualities (skills).
Imagine a system that allows an employer to describe the necessary qualities of a candidate, their characteristics, and their importance for this particular position in detail. The system compares this information with a candidate’s profile and provides precisely targeted recommendations. Only the skills of a person are important.
DecisionWanted is just that: a fundamentally new look at the job search system and recruiting as a whole. Based on original algorithms, a neural network works to find the candidate’s compliance with the requirements of the vacancy, in accordance with skills (hard, soft). When responding to a vacancy, a candidate and a recruiter immediately receive an automatic detailed report on the profile’s compliance with the requirements of the vacancy. This saves you hours of live chat time to get the information that DecisionWanted provides instantly.
The system calculates a percentage of matching skills of the candidate and the company and the only thing they have left to do is to make a decision. On the main page of the service, you can see a visual example of how it works.
The competency matrix is designed in such a way that the system allows you to assign different weights to different skills when describing a vacancy. This makes it possible to get perfect matches of employers and candidates.
Therefore, recruiters or candidates, when filling out a profile, can be sure that they will not waste time on pointless interviews. In addition, thanks to the platform, the need to create resumes in outdated formats disappears. As mentioned above, sending resumes in .docx or .pdf format is a slightly outdated strategy for finding a job in IT. A profile on DecisionWanted becomes a modern, digital, interactive, and up-to-date resume, which both works on the platform and can be sent by a candidate to an employer.
The mission of the service is to build a global bank of candidates’ skills with a possibility of instant selection of perfect vacancies, and vice versa — candidates for vacancies. The system is global, created for all countries, languages, time zones, skills, etc. from the very beginning.
If you are looking for a job or employees — sign up on DecisionWanted right now! Check out all the advantages of modern recruiting.