IT Landscape for Contract Workers

For businesses seeking to grow their workforce quickly or supplement permanent personnel, contract workers can fill in the gaps. Especially in the IT field, contractors often fill key positions, where experts are urgently needed now. Here we’ll look at some of the trends and tendencies favoring contract workers – and how to use these trends to better fill out your workforce as you plan for 2018.

Millennial Trends Means More Aspiring IT Contractors

To start, two key trends among the millennial generation are driving the availability of IT contractors: independence and tech savvy. Trends show that millennials tend to value work where they can set their own hours, work from home, and pursue personal career growth. Where millennials do favor steady jobs as well, they are far more comfortable with shifting jobs and even careers. As such, contracting presents an attractive possibility to many millennial workers. When it comes to switching jobs, more millennials turn to IT than any other job sector. As such, the market for talented IT workers is flooded with those either in IT looking for new positions or looking to crack the market and make a career change.

Demand for IT Also Means More Available Positions

At the same time that more workers than ever before are seeking flexible IT jobs, the demand for IT workers is also on the rise. Startups and other small businesses need talented IT staff in order to help set up their business and to stay competitive. Large companies and government offices often bring in contracted staff to deal with upgrades, security, and other limited-term projects. As such, talented IT contractors generally have more work available than they can handle. In the current IT landscape, things are constantly changing, always moving. Contractors – especially contractors knowledgeable in specialized areas – continue to be in high demand.

How to Attract the Right IT Contract Workers

The modern IT landscape looks like a vast and complex machine with many moving parts working together. Experts move to and fro to fill needed roles. Businesses send out requests for assistance and wait for available resources. The key to finding the right workers for a job is to understand how this machine functions and how to get the parts you need when you need them.

1. Understand how to clearly state your needs. Have tech-savvy business partners on hand, able to translate needs into jargon and relevant expertise. IT contractors are often looking for key words, such as coding languages, database names, and server types together with skill levels and areas of experience. It really helps to understand these technical details, because recruiting the right person for the job in a cluttered advertising market is a marketing effort in and of itself.
2. Put together the right benefits package for the job. Some jobs may lead to permanent positions. Others positions may be short-term jobs where you want someone willing to come in, do the work, and go. Even if you’re not sure where this position is headed, try to tailor benefits – if any – toward individuals who will fill the role as you see it developing.
3. Check qualifications against needs. Make sure that you have tech-savvy interviewers who can check backgrounds to make sure potential hires have the skills needed to get the job done. Check references, confirm backgrounds, or interview potential hires to confirm knowledge of relevant skills and professional ability. Consider incorporating code challenges, design thinking exercises, or other activities into your traditional screens to make the process interesting and challenging.

Remember, the IT landscape is a busy one. More than ever, talented individuals are looking for IT jobs, and more than ever, businesses need people to perform necessary tasks. Make the most of this opportunity by attracting and screening the right candidates. Knowing how to survey the field will help you to put skill sets in their proper categories and make sound choices as a result.