IT staffing is the act of finding job candidates with the specialized skills needed to fill technology roles on your team. And with the computer and information technology industry constantly expanding and evolving, the staffing process is changing too.
There are a lot of positions to be filled and ones that require highly educated workers. These roles are frequently increasingly specialized as new technology comes on the market and old skills become obsolete. The person you hire to handle software development won’t necessarily be the same person you’d want to oversee your network’s security. So, how do you find the IT industry’s best candidates with the required skill sets for specific roles?
Since IT hiring is a skill of its own, it’s sometimes not enough to work with recruiters at a staffing agency or make a direct hire. Whoever is leading the hiring process needs to understand the nuances of the industry and the technical skills a job candidate needs to succeed. Of course, as you move through the process, your business needs—and the skills required to meet them—should be front and centre.
What is IT staffing?
IT staffing is the process of finding and hiring the top IT professionals to complete certain tasks or projects or do ongoing work for your business. These open positions might run the gamut from full-time positions and contract-to-hire roles to filling short-term temporary staffing needs.
Traditionally, IT staffing refers to a company working with an outside IT staffing service agency to recruit professionals and connect with qualified job seekers. But IT staffing can be accomplished internally through an HR team, as well.
As IT roles become more specialized, IT recruiting is becoming more nuanced and complicated. IT is a broad field with a number of specialized areas and subgroups, including cybersecurity, software development, IT infrastructure, IT support, and data management.
They’re all technical positions that require different skills. Those outside the IT sector might not understand that just because someone is an amazing software developer doesn’t mean they’ll work out well in a data management position.
As technology evolves, these roles will only become more specialized. Recruiters and hiring managers need to understand they’re filling positions that require subject matter experts with specific IT skill sets.
Pros and cons of IT staffing
Generally, IT staffing refers to when a company hires a staffing services agency to hire qualified talent. Working with an outside company to fill these important roles has various pros and cons. Here are some to consider before you sign a contract with a staffing agency.
Pros of IT staffing
There are a lot of positives to working with a staffing firm. Here are a few to keep in mind:
- The process might move faster than if your business handled recruiting and hiring on its own.
- IT Staffing company might provide access to a wider pool of top talent. Since they’re established recruiters, they already have a pool of job seekers to cull from, and as hiring experts, they understand how to reach others.
- These firms could help you connect with workers with highly specialized skills.
- Having others focus on hiring could free up more of your time and other resources. The less time you spend interviewing candidates and reviewing applications, the more time you can spend on managing your team and focusing on IT projects.
Cons of IT staffing
There are also potential drawbacks to using an IT staffing solution. Some disadvantages include:
- Working with a recruiting firm can be more costly, as the markup on a worker hired through these firms can be as much as 100% of their hourly wage. That’s a lot of money to spend when a direct hire can be much less expensive. Do you want the hiring process to eat into that much of your budget?
- You typically have less control over the hiring process when working with a middleman—the staffing agency representative—which could be frustrating for some IT business leaders.
- There’s potential for lack of transparency and communication issues if you’re not fully in the loop about who the agency is talking to and where they stand in the hiring process. This could slow the process down, and if you’re not intimately involved every step of the way, you could wind up with a pool of candidates you wouldn’t have selected yourself.
- The staffing agency’s pool of workers might not fit your specialized IT needs. We’ve already talked about how IT jobs can be highly niche. If you’re not working with a company that specifically deals with IT talent, you might be wasting your time, as many of them likely don’t have access to the technical talent you need.
- If you’re not interviewing and assessing candidates yourself, you may not get a feel for whether a candidate fits in well with your company culture. It would be a shame to spend the time, money, and other resources hiring a candidate who your hiring manager might have weeded out early in the process once they realized they weren’t a good fit culture-wise.
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