It's raining resumes

What do you get when you cross massive job cuts in the IT industry with relatively few job openings?

Lots of résumés, and good ones at that.

Win Shih, IT director at St. Louis University, says the school received 15 qualified applications in just one week in response to an entry-level IT position posted in June. A year ago, it took three-plus weeks to get that many good applications for a similar job.

Sidebar: How to get the pick of the litter

"Not surprisingly, we found that this summer's batch of candidates possessed a considerably higher skill set and level of work experience than last year's bunch," he says.

Another hirer, Richard Glasburg, says he can now be "more fussy about who I hire." But with employee retention high on his list of priorities, the director of data communications for the commonwealth of Massachusetts has to be particularly selective.

"If I hire a person who takes a significant pay cut, my thinking is that they're only half on board. They have one foot out the door, waiting for the tech sector to break out again," he says. "Someone willing to go from being a high-level engineer to a help desk person is not a good gamble for me as a manager."

Despite the swollen pool of candidates - outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas reports that nearly 1 million job cuts were announced in the U.S. through July - Glasburg is still struggling to find people with the right mix of technical and management expertise.

"Finding the right people has the same degree of difficulty as it did way back when, but now there's just a bigger mixed bag to choose from," he says.

An IT Association of America (ITAA) study in April found a "national IT workforce of 10.4 million" with an estimated 425,000 positions that may go unfilled because of a "lack of applicants with the requisite technical and nontechnical skills." The ITAA says, "despite the experience of individual companies, the U.S. requirement for a steady supply of new IT workers continues. While the current economic slowdown has diminished demand, such demand for new talent persists."

ITAA President Harris Miller calls reports about massive layoffs in the IT industry more hype than reality, and he even points to U.S. Department of Labor statistics that show the national unemployment rate holding steady at 4.5% as proof that things aren't so bad. Still, he confirms the need for high-level IT and telecommunications professionals remains strong and that IT professionals who won huge salaries right out of college will have to keep improving their skills while settling for lower pay.

The newly unemployed who have worked in network and computer infrastructure positions have the best chance of getting hired in this weak economy, says Barbara Gomolski, research director at Gartner.

"Infrastructure is not discretionary and must be maintained," she says.

Gian Zoppo, CIO for Porter Novelli's U.S. region, says those employees being let go by big network companies don't necessarily have the skills in demand by IT shops.

"The biggest need is on the programming side, such as for Java, and for integrating legacy applications with new ones, such as those based on XML," he says.

Deep cuts

Of the nearly 1 million job cuts announced for the first six months of 2001, more than a third were in the telecommunications, computer and electronics industries, according to outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

Network engineers and architects are also much in demand, as are those with expertise in technologies such as Cisco networks and Unix, adds Diane Berry, a vice president at People3, a research firm affiliated with Gartner.

"For a while, companies would hire candidates if they were breathing," Berry says. "Now they are being much more selective, homing in on the skill sets that are really necessary."

Such findings may explain why Patrick Morris, a network engineer laid off when Pilot Network Services went bankrupt in April, had to wait a month or so before finding another position in his field for about the same pay. Morris at one time found it "annoying" when a small update to his résumé would trigger endless job offers, prompting him to even take his phone off the hook at times. But his most recent experience in the IT job market changed that attitude.

"I don't think my phone rang once for more than a week," Morris says. "This time I kept having to check the Monster.com site to see if anyone at all was interested in giving me a job."

It's raining resumes

Deep cuts

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