How Is The IT Job Market?

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  AndyC1 on 08/10/2024 - 19:26

  +1

  Not much hiring. Redundancies have occurred in allot of companies and I expect more to come if the 5 day back in the office does not cause allot of resignations.
  There is also outsourcing occurring to make things appear to be cheaper to run, but this is not the case in allot of situations.

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  dbnewman89 on 08/10/2024 - 19:29

  Depends on the role, expectations, and whether or not you've kept up with the industry trends. Plenty out there if you're cloud native and willing to work hybrid, if you're an old schooler who is still tied to onprem or expecting to work fully remote it's not going to go well.

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  Jimothy Wongingtons on 08/10/2024 - 19:30

  It’s been on a steady decline for some years now, you say 20 years - but is that in a specialist role? Hard to be replaced/outsourced?

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  vr0ssi46 on 08/10/2024 - 19:55

  What area of IT do you specialise in?

  • 

    b_sean on 08/10/2024 - 21:55

    Cybersecuriy

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  crentist on 08/10/2024 - 20:23

  +4

  Since late last week? A bit early to panic mate. Direct applications always take longer to respond, and are tougher because they get flooded with applicants and generally have slow internal procedures.

  Opposite with recruiters, as they have more incentive to actually go through the flood of applications, and race each other to get interviews as soon as possible. I find they post most ads early in the week, and are more likely to respond if you apply within a day or two, so they can book you in before the end of week.
  Monday should be your busy application day. But public holiday Monday tends to make the whole week slow, so forget about this week.

  But yes it's harder to find work at the moment, salaries are down etc.

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  freefall101 on 08/10/2024 - 20:56

  -1

  I am looking for job in IT (20+ years experience in toal). I have applied for nearly 30 job since late last week and till date, I have received only 1 response (and that too of being unsuccessful at the Resume screening stage).

  That means you're still in the pipeline for most, which is a good thing. Also might be worth talking to an agency so they can float you for jobs. There can be a weird scramble before year end (I know where I work we're trying to explain to a bunch of managers that if they want people to start January, they need to get the jobs approved now).

  Some recruiters like to run the ad at least a week or two before screening through, others like to quickly tick people off, you need to give it 2 weeks to hear anything in most cases.

  I don't know if it's my resume (I update my resume to address job requirements for almost each application as no 2 jobs are same). Most of my applications are submitted to direct employers i.e. not to recruitment agencys. Is this normal?

  Agencies tend to get more work from smaller companies, big companies are all inhouse or RPOs these days, so that makes sense. Honestly, I wouldn't worry too much about your resume. However you should make sure your LinkedIn page is up to date (and if you don't have one, get a LinkedIn page). If your skills match up to the job, you'll get a call, no matter how crap your resume is. If you're addressing the job requirements, you're a mile ahead.

  I was speaking to one the agent and he was saying due to influx of migrants and lay-offs market is very saturated - is that true?

  There were a lot of layoffs in IT in particular. Influx of migrants is rubbish, we haven't had a sudden influx of IT migrants. However layoffs have hit hard the past 24 months and there are a LOT of candidates.

  Depends what you do though. Specialised, it shouldn't take long. But where I am we've had a couple of project manager roles with 200+ applicants.

  • 

    b_sean on 08/10/2024 - 22:00

    Thanks for detailed response. I was comparing this experience (no call/updae on applicaions) to previous times where I had calls (again especially from agencies as opposed to companies themselves) immediaely after applications.

    For nearly las 6 years, I have been working in Securiy (manily EDR/Email Securiy/SASE/a bit applicaion security and SSL Cert Lifecyle Management) and previous to that last 14 years have been in neworks (switching/routing) and securiy (firewall/ips/ids)

    • 

      freefall101 on 09/10/2024 - 00:33

      It’s pretty different. Agencies are super hungry for good candidates to ship around. Companies are a bit slower but it’s a more solid process.

      Generally speaking, security is in huge demand. You could try Latitude, Robert Half, etc and they’ll find you work. But you’ve got the skills that you can probably be picky. Depends what you want to do, edu and banking are screaming out for people with your skills, in IT companies it might be harder, IT teams in smaller companies might be smaller teams and more freedom. Where I work we’re bringing a lot of our security in house, we lack the recruiting skills to pick up people like yourself.

      But tl;dr, it’ll take a little longer but it’s hard to imagine you won’t get some queries in the next week or so. It was also a public holiday in most states on Monday, recruitment teams are rarely in the same city they’re recruiting for, so they were playing catchup today.

      • 

        b_sean on 09/10/2024 - 09:11

        Thanks

    • 

      dbnewman89 on 09/10/2024 - 01:04

      This may kind of be the problem, next-gen security products like Crowdstrike and Mimecast are getting so good you no longer need to hire somebody FT to manage them, LetsEncrypt and ACM have killed SSL lifecycle management by automating the hell out of it, and Networking is a dead skill in the world of Software defined.

      Cybersec is beginning to be a bit of a flooded market now too, personally I find it boring as hell (I'm a Solutions Architect in the AWS/serverless world) but there's a whole new generation of people specialising in it now.

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  DrPotato on 09/10/2024 - 07:05

  +1

  I am in DevOps and market for it has been recovering slowly over the past few months. Seeing a lot more job listings than 2023. Not sure how many of those are genuine though. I moved companies earlier this year and had received several interviews, quite a few of which translated to good offers.

  On the other hand, I was also interviewing candidates for a Cloud role at my former company and we received a very large number of applications - mostly from temporary visa holders (graduate and temporary work visa mostly). My manager wanted me to interview them even when their experience clearly didn't match our requirements (or they didn't have any). As expected, the candidates were largely unimpressive - many couldn't even answer simple questions on Git. Manager ultimately decided to offshore the role - where talent wasn't any better but at least it was cheaper.

  I won't be looking at new roles for a few months at least while hoping that interest rate cuts will lead to a better market for applicants.

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  b_sean on 09/10/2024 - 09:12

  Thank you all for your responses thus far…..very insighful.

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  87percent on 09/10/2024 - 09:14

  Wow, a whole week??

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  b_sean on 10/10/2024 - 20:40

  I had a couple of calls since I wrote this post - both from agencies - both liked resume/profile etc and forwarded to prospective employer - I had first screening inerview with one of them and no update on the 2nd one.

  I am still surprised with no contact/update after so many applications. May be employers waiting until end date of submission of applicaion before moving ahead.

  Thanks everyone for commenting and sharing your view.

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  darkmattersunB6c0MV on 13/10/2024 - 20:08

  Too early to worry.
  To be frank the businesses are cautious and want to take time to make the right hire.
  Also the school holidays may be affecting the time of response.
  Best of luck and don't worry.

  Also, later, to ensure that you are in demand, please consider upskilling to include either Azure, AWS or GCP security (depends on your prospective employer market).
  Although certs don't mean much, having them will give you more options. For example, done companies need a certain number of certified staff for special partner status, discounts etc.

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    b_sean on 14/10/2024 - 13:02

    Thanks for comforting words.