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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
The quotes below are about this issue:
Employers are also having difficulty filling mid-level to senior-level leadership positions.
| "We have a higher expectation of the employees we hire. And typically—in past experience—it's not somebody that's very green in the IT field. And we pay. We're not afraid to pay a premium, so we expect a higher level of person when we bring them on. We actually stretch from—we're out in the oil fields of North Dakota to Wisconsin to down into Iowa—and it's kind of the same all over. It really is. We're seeing that." | Central |
| "I think the data is very much in alignment with our experience. In fact, the problem may be worse than the data shows. We've had several senior leadership positions open for six months or a year. Very difficult to find. There are a couple reasons. One is that our location is mostly in marginal Minnesota, so a rural area. That limits our candidate pool. Also, the high salaries that people are demanding with only partial skill set matches." | Metro |
| "We are trying to influence our leaders to think about how we attract and select talent for our organization in a different kind of way. Rather than meeting a list of 20 qualifications, we need to be very thoughtful about how we select that talent. Then, with an eye to what they can learn and what they can be trained on. Because in the scheme of things—listening to people talk about competencies—people generally fail at the job and it's [lost in translation] the competency such as dragging execution or strategic relationships or communication skills. It's not that they don't know the technical piece. That's been my experience, anyway. So, I think what we're trying to do is influence leaders to think about how do we select talent, how do we attract it, and how do we start to build pipelines? And some of that's external, and some of that's internal. It's a mix of how we're recruiting employees, how we're doing staff augmentation, and how we create those pipelines. So, it's many pieces, many cogs in the wheel." | Metro |
| "We are a small organization. We have fewer than 25 people—that's our whole IT group. So, we are not looking at entry-level like you guys are. But what you are saying is exactly a problem that we still see when we interview people who have two years, three years, or five years of experience. They come in without the social skills. They don't know how to communicate. One of the things that we do is we run them by our technical people to understand that they have the technical skills. You can see some of it in the resume, but you see a really good chunk of it as you talk about the jobs that they have been doing. And then we run it by a circle of people to see what they will be like. And that's where they fall sometimes." | Metro |
| "A lot of representatives here are probably looking for people with more than five, 10, or 15 years of experience." | 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 |
| "Employer: Our company is looking for those software engineers, so we're looking for four-year degree people. I think we're getting enough entry-level talent. The experienced talent is extremely difficult to find. Yeah. Even those with two or three years of experience, we have to go search for them. Question: Ideally, when you say experienced, how many years is that? Employer: Literally, it can be two or three years. It's getting someone at that two year mark. Getting to that level where they can handle things on their own. That's a tougher period to get through." |
Northeast |
| "And we'll hire on specs now. If the right person walks in the door, we won't pass them up, even if we don't necessarily know how we're going to use them. If they come in with experience, we'll grab them. Because, otherwise, they'll be gone." | Northeast |
| "Question: So, if you wanted to get somebody with, say, three years of experience, you would struggle? Employer: We changed our strategy about 100 percent several years back. We just stopped trying. I mean we still put a job posting out there that says, 'Experience preferred,' but it's once every blue moon that somebody applies with actual experience." |
Northeast |
| "We're basically a small to mid-sized company. But we're really an IT shop. There are only a half a dozen of us for 800 employees spread across eight facilities, including Mexico. The ability to hit-the-ground running is really what we're looking for in people. So, people just right out of school, yeah, there's a place for them, but they end up dealing with someone's printer that doesn't work, that sort of thing. Sort of a PC jockey, if you will. We're really looking for somebody that has more skills." | Northwest |
| "When we look at positions where we aren't going to back down from the requirements, in some cases, we have a job famine. So, we may have an engineer or two and a senior engineer. We may start looking for the senior engineer that is Cisco [lost in translation]. We may not be able to find quite the candidate that we need and so we bring in more of a mid-level person and then try to grow them. But there are dangers with that, too, because sometimes you grow them and then they go someplace else. So, that's a problem as well." | Southwest |
| "It's difficult getting the higher level people, the professional engineer types. We're out of southwestern Minnesota in a rural area. I can't go to the Twin Cities and hire a professional engineer and bring him or her to rural Minnesota. He or she would have severe culture shock." | Southwest |