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Employer Quotes

The quotes below are from employers in this industry: Information Technology (IT)

They are talking about this topic: Needs & Challenges in Continuing Education

 

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The quotes below are about this issue:
Many employers are having difficulty finding quality entry-level applicants in general and/or applicants for specific occupations, including engineers, technicians, and software and database development specialists.

Employer Quote Region
"Well, we find it's very—I mean, we had a hard time hiring qualified applicants in St. Cloud to the degree. I think one of the things we look for is someone that can really think critically. Not just a heads-down programmer, but somebody that can also think about something from a business perspective. And we have a hard time finding qualified people that are willing to stay in St. Cloud, because that's where we need them. So, we typically have a really hard time. So, it seems not in-sync that central Minnesota has this high output of talent supposedly...but I don't know that they all stay here in St. Cloud." Central
"We get a lot of applicants that come through, but finding a quality applicant is hard." Central
"For an internship with four intern slots, we interviewed and screened maybe 80 candidates down to four. And it was kind of a struggle for us to find that. So, finding quality candidates has been a struggle for us." Central
"We use PEARL programming for our database. And our last position that we were hiring for we had probably two applicants from Minnesota and about 48 from the rest of the country. And it's just been hard to find somebody with the right skills, the right mindset, and the right drive to fill our programming needs. As a result, almost all of our IT staff is remote. And that's the wonders of technology. We can handle that through project management software and innovation. We would definitely love to have more local employees, but when you're located in Little Falls, Minnesota, it's pretty tough sometimes." Central
"In the last few months I had to hire three new employees. I stopped putting ads out for telecom because there just aren't any people coming out of the ad system for telecom. I couldn't find anyone, and I viewed well over 30 applicants for three positions. So, something that was supposed to take three months—to try to find the three people—took me nine months." Central
"Employer: I spend a lot of time in San Francisco with the role of [lost in translation]. And it's amazing to me how many candidates I find working specifically closer with Google. They are coming from outside of those markets. And the types of talent that I see that they get—in fact, I'm setting up a program where I'm taking Google's rejects. So, the people that Google doesn't hire, I'm getting their resumes. Because so often I see this drain-out of all of these other markets for the really top talent—the very intelligent and the very motivated with a lot of those soft skills—they are just getting gobbled up and they are leaving. So, it's very hard to then find that kind of talent back here. So, the types of people that I'm seeing—fresh out of school—that are getting hired specifically by Google within the context of where I work versus the types of talent I'm trying to attract here in Minnesota are very different. It's very different candidates.

Question: So, you are getting the top-shelf candidates?

Employer: It's hard. Yeah. And I don't think it's because I'm poor at recruiting. It's just the top-shelf candidates are getting gobbled up.

Question: And you don't think it's funny?

Employer: I don't. Because I know exactly what they pay at Google."		 Metro
"I'm looking for Symphony engineers right now. I'm looking to pay them around $120,000 a year. Show me guys that are good at Symphony. We are talking about a level of specialization that doesn't exist—in most cases they are not going to be on the school system with those core specialization skills—it's their years of self-developing them." Metro
"We are a smaller organization, so a lot of my peers are struggling with these issues. Yeah, there is a supply and there are people out there who have graduated. The challenge is they're graduating with a skill set that isn't quite current enough for the demands for the role that we have. So, this is one part of the conversation." Metro
"In terms of our experience at our company, I think we are seeing quite a few grads—although not as many as what we used to see before—for engineering and for information technology specialist. But the challenge that we see is that we are competing against a number of companies out there for candidates. So, are there enough to go around for all of us?" Metro
"The big challenge for us, more recently, was finding people with technical skills." Metro
"We break down our leadership competencies into four major groups: thought leadership, results leadership, people leadership, and personal leadership. But we have challenges finding candidates that really kind of round-out nicely to fill all four of these competencies." Metro
"We have positions open in the application development space. We've had management positions open, and we've had operations positions. And we've had challenges filling all of those. We've had to get pretty tactical in terms of widening the folks that we look for. We have had to address some of our hiring needs by investing in training. Hiring folks and then training them in management positions. Those kinds of things." Metro
"The data actually matches up pretty well with what we're seeing. I looked at the number of open postings we had in January of 2012—so just a couple of months ago—and in technology we had 133 openings. We're now up to 152. When I look at those, the primary need is in software development. In that area we now have 65 openings. The next big chunk is datacenter and then management." Metro
"This was not all that recent—it was late last year—but in the area of desktop technology and infrastructure, in the Microsoft space, in particular virtualization, the forward-working pieces of that technology...it's very challenging to find people in that area." Metro
"We haven't found a lot of success at the entry-level, whether it's two-year or four-year. And finding the people with two or three years of experience...we're looking for pretty specialized skills, I mean, it's pretty much web development." Northeast
"We need engineers, preferably with PE licensure, which are very hard to find here." Northwest
"What we're looking for, I guess with our needs, is the 'PC jockey.' Everybody always has these little issues, so we'd like to find somebody that can handle those little issues for us..." Northwest
"Historically, we've struggled, and I don't see that changing. Tech jobs are the hard ones to fill." Northwest
"I would say all of them for us. We're not necessarily mining enough qualified candidates. So, in some cases, you're having jobs open longer than you need or you're taking an entry-level person internally." Southwest
"We have a hard time finding a large enough cohort." Southwest