IT clients get choosy

Firms are looking for more intelligent real-time reporting. Photo / Supplied

The recovery from the crash of 2008 has been slow but steady for people in IT as organisations rebuild their teams and take on projects.

But are they prepared to spend what's needed to get staff, or do the salary expectations or workers need to be tempered?

Glen Bratton, the general manager of recruiters Candle, expects the next three to six months to be similar to the past two quarters, with a steady incline but no mad spurts or activity.

The ration of contracts to permanent staff positions that Candle is filling is running at about 60:40. "We're still in a reasonably candidate-short market, but clients are being choosy about who they take," Bratton says.

"Salaries are increasing along the lines of the consumer price index. There's nothing untoward there. Clients aren't going out and buying talent. People are setting a salary that is reasonably competitive and waiting. Often it's conditions that swing whether someone takes the job. Everybody we place now asks: 'What is in it for me, what other benefits are there?"' Bratton says.

Megan Alexander, from Robert Half New Zealand, says she is seeing pressure on salaries starting to emerge. There is high demand and not enough candidates, so we are seeing multiple offers and people being prepared to increase their offers.

"Companies who have not kept up with the change may be surprised when candidates turn down their offer because it's an unrealistic salary."

However, she cautions candidates to understand where they are in the IT pyramid when setting their expectations.

In a country with a lot of small IT shops, there are only so many well-paid chief information officer (CIO) positions available, and the positions below may not be as highly paid as people could expect elsewhere.

Alexander says it's similar to the situation in finance and accounting, where a recent Robert Half workplace survey found almost a third of firms thought candidates had salary expectations that were too high and that candidates over-claimed their abilities.

"They think about their value in isolation, without taking into account that it's an extremely competitive market out there with more applicants than before competing for mid-tier positions," Alexander says.

Experience is also no guide, with IT staff with 20 or more years of experience not expected to earn much more than those with six or seven years.

Robert Half IT recruitment specialist Adam Roy says there are many business intelligence and data warehousing projects on the go, creating a demand for people with not only an understanding of database design and construction but of the new Microsoft and Oracle reporting and analysis tools.

"Firms want real-time reporting and more intelligent reporting, so they can make longer forecasts," Roy says. "It's not one year they want, it's 15 years ahead, and deeply analytical. "Typically we have seen people go into application development and software development, but we are now seeing a resurgence of database developers."

Roy says the process integration and the search for cost savings coming out of the recession is driving the demand for business analysts and project managers.

There's work out there for applications developers, particularly those with good Microsoft.NET skills.

"Auckland is very Microsoft-centric. Some firms did look at open source during the recession, but big business still struggles with the idea."

In a Robert Half survey of chief information officers, two thirds said that understaffing hindered their ability to put in the emerging technologies that could give their firms a competitive advantage.

The heavier burdens that staffing limits placed on IT employees during the downturn also had an effect, with more than a third of workers saying they would be more inclined to jump ship when the economy is back on solid ground.