The current IT job climate is facing a paradox in which many IT professionals claim it is too difficult to find a job at the same time as many companies say it is overly difficult to find the right employees. According to a recent Computerworld report, there are a variety of perspectives on this issue, with a great deal of diversity emerging as to what organizations are actually looking for in workers.
The news source explained there are many companies out there that have unrealistic expectations for their workers. They expect every prospective employee to be a superstar who maintained a 4.0 GPA and was the lead figure in every club and sport in high school and continued the trend through college. But these unreasonable expectations are not necessarily prevalent in every company. There are more realistic issues going on.
For example, Jim Gaskell, director of global insite products at Crown Equipment, told the news source the company has plenty of IT job openings and is able to find candidates that meet their requirements fairly easily. But the company operates in a rural part of Ohio where many people do not want to live, making it hard to find workers.
Appian, a business process management software developer, has another set of problems. Michael Beckley, the CTO and a founder of Appian, told Computerworld that the job market is more competitive than many people think because there is significant demand for emerging skills that are beginning to play a major role in the market.
At Appian, Beckley explained, there is considerable demand for mobile application developers. However, the company is not overly interested in standard development capabilities, such as revising code to customize a program or testing code. He told the news source the company is looking for mobile app developers capable of thinking about the future of the industry and creating solutions that enable innovation and push the industry forward, not just provide commodity skills.
For companies seeking IT employees, finding the right balance of skills can be difficult, especially since organizations have to balance information coming in from mobile and social sources. One way for businesses to turn the overwhelming amount of data into better human resources practices is to implement BPM software solutions that integrate data from diverse sources, automate time-consuming processes and free workers to develop more effective hiring processes.
