Tag: hiring tips

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IT Decision-makers Tips & errors to avoid

The Top 3 Mistakes to Avoid When Hiring an IT Contractor

The Top 3 Mistakes to Avoid When Hiring an IT Contractor
Recruitment: 3 major mistakes to avoid when hiring an IT contractor or freelancer: Hiring the wrong freelancers can quickly derail your project...

What are the top 3 mistakes that you should avoid when hiring an IT contractor? Working with IT contractors keeps getting more and more popular in the world of work. And for good reason: including freelancers in your projects can bring great benefits to your whole team.  

IT contractors are a workforce that is often very qualified and cost-effective. Especially in the context of a one-off increase in company activity or under special circumstances such as the Covid-19 pandemic. However, hiring the wrong freelancers can quickly derail your project and leave you with a bad taste in your mouth.  

Need advice on how to start or develop your freelance consulting business in tech or IT? Need to start a new permanent or freelance assignment? Join Mindquest and get support from our team of experts.

Recruitment: 3 major mistakes to avoid when hiring an IT contractor or freelancer:

1st of top mistakes to avoid when hiring: Not vetting the consultant’s qualifications thoroughly

You need to make sure that a consultant recruited for a particular skill possesses it and in a way that is well-suited to the reality of your project. 

To protect yourself against this difficulty; which can cause harm, both financially and in terms of reputation; it is necessary that you thoroughly vet the veracity of the freelancer’s claims and assess the true depth of their technical skills. Start with these questions: 

  • Has the freelancer provided a list of previous relevant projects? Have you verified their references? 
  • Has the freelancer justified their skills with a document or portfolio of any kind? 

During the interview process, you must ask pointed questions about the candidate’s area of expertise. It will quickly reveal the reality of the situation.  

Also read How to manage the onboarding of IT contractors in 5 steps

2nd mistake : Hiring a Consultant who does not align with your company’s values and culture 

In order to avoid divergences in operating methods, which can lead to confusion and frictions within the teams; it is preferable to choose a freelancer who aligns with the company’s values. Here, you should pay special attention to the candidate’s softer skills. As these are the ones that will determine how well the contractor fits into your existing team. 

The same goes for ensuring that the consultant aligns and complies with legal and confidentiality requirements. Make sure they fully understand your confidentiality policies and non-disclosure agreement (NDA) so that they unknowingly break the contract. 

Also read How to Manage the Offboarding of IT Contractors in 7 Steps

3rd mistake: Setting an inappropriate remuneration rate 

DevSecOps Job Description

The third most common mistake made by companies looking to hire a freelancer is to offer a pay rate that is not in line with market standards. Whether it is higher or lower than what is normally charged in that particular field of expertise and for that level of seniority. 

If you set a daily remuneration that is too high; you will end up paying more than what you need to. Plus, your collaboration with the contractor may not be sustainable in the long term. 

On the contrary, if you set a remuneration that is too low; you will have difficulty attracting good candidates with a suitable level of experience. 

Companies not used to working with freelancers are precisely the ones that usually make these mistakes. Keep in mind that collaboration should be seen from a balanced angle and in a “win-win” relationship. Only then will the collaboration be efficient in the long term. 

Embracing AI Trends in IT Recruitment

Lat but not least, the implementation of AI in recruitment practices has the potential to revolutionize how companies identify, engage, and hire IT contractors.

Here’s a closer look at how embracing AI trends can enhance your IT recruitment processes:

  • Streamline candidate vetting processes.
  • Analyze resumes for relevant skills and experience.
  • Predict candidate success based on data analytics.
  • Enhance decision-making during the hiring process.

By embracing these AI trends in IT recruitment, companies can not only stay competitive but also gain a significant edge in identifying and securing the best-fit IT contractors for their projects.

Don’t miss our Top 5 Strategies to Overcome the AI Talent Gap.

Mindquest, with its commitment to staying at the forefront of industry advancements, ensures that your recruitment strategies align with the latest AI innovations, facilitating a smoother and more effective hiring process.

Would you like to find out more about our recruitment service for IT consultants? Post your requirements now, or find out more about our job offers directly on our Mindquest platform!

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Hiring an IT consultant IT Decision-makers

Choosing the Right Recruiting Partner for Your IT Needs

right recruitment partner

In the rapidly evolving landscape of IT, hiring and retaining top talent continue to pose challenges for modern enterprises. Also, the ongoing skills deficit, exacerbated by the fast-changing technological terrain, necessitates a strategic edge for IT leaders and HR managers. Therefore, choosing the right recruiting partner remains crucial. Explore our updated tips for selecting the ideal partner to address your current IT talent needs.

Need advice on how to start or develop your consulting business in tech or IT? Join Mindquest and get support from our team of experts.


Choosing the Right Recruiting Partner: The impact of technology

Digital transformation permeates every aspect of modern business, including recruiting and human resources. When assessing a staffing firm, pay attention to how it leverages technology to enhance operations and deliver superior service. In today’s context, it’s essential for an IT staffing firm to embrace technology fully.

Consider advancements in AI tools, which now play a pivotal role in expediting the recruitment process. AI enables swift processing of extensive candidate data, including previous roles, areas of expertise, and preferences. In a field where time is critical, the ability to rapidly match candidate profiles with company requirements is a decisive advantage.

Dedicated Support and Expertise: A Dual Perspective

Most staffing firms traditionally combine client management and candidate identification into a single role. However, the best firms take a dual-perspective approach. One team manages client interactions, gathering position details and requirements, while another team focuses on identifying the right candidate. This separation enhances efficiency, speed, and the overall quality of work. It allows both client management and candidate sourcing to offer more personalized, dedicated support to hiring companies.

In the current landscape, with the increasing complexity of roles and the ongoing talent shortage, the need for dedicated expertise has never been more apparent. Specialized skills required for a position can vary significantly based on the field and seniority. To address this, leading staffing firms structure their teams by specialization, ensuring staff members are proficient in the specific areas of expertise required for a given vacancy.

Innovation through Data and Insights: Adapting to the Current Market

The third piece of the puzzle is data. As it happens in any other industry, quality insights are at the heart of a successful IT hiring strategy. Look for recruiters who know how to make the most of the data they come by with and mine.

Moreover, being in permanent contact with organisations and IT professionals allows the best staffing firms to develop a deep and well-rounded understanding of current industry trends. These firms have a good sense of the challenges and needs driving mid- and long-term goals for clients and candidates. In addition to this, data-savvy recruiters can provide you with a more qualitative level of market intelligence – like the skill requirements and salary for a typical position – from which to derive actionable insights. 

Navigating the Dynamic IT Landscape

In conclusion, the challenges of hiring in IT persist, but the strategies for overcoming them have evolved. Choosing a recruiting partner is more critical than ever, with technology, dedicated support, and data-driven insights at the forefront. As the IT landscape continues to shift, selecting a partner who adapts and innovates ensures your organization secures the top-tier talent needed to thrive in the dynamic IT market.

Explore how Mindquest can be your strategic IT recruiting partner.


Categories
IT Decision-makers Tips & errors to avoid

5 experts to hire to strengthen an IT team

5 experts to hire to strengthen an IT team
We at Club Freelance have prepared a shortlist of experts to hire to and incorporate to strengthen an IT team if you haven’t done so yet.

Beyond your department’s immediate needs, it is important that you keep in mind the mid- and long-term needs of your company. As your organization’s IT leader, you must ensure that you’re building a team capable of staying aligned with the technology and business trends that are most likely to emerge in the following years. That means not only promoting continuous education among your already existing team, but also looking for new talent that will bring in those skills and ways of thinking that will future-proof it. It’s often hard to identify the right candidate or profile in all the clutter, so we at Club Freelance have prepared a shortlist of experts to hire to and incorporate to strengthen an IT team if you haven’t done so yet.

The top 5 experts to hire to strengthen an IT team

A business-savvy data scientist

First of the experts to hire to strengthen an IT team: the data scientist. It’s no secret that a solid data strategy is one of the key components of any respectable CIO’s digital transformation plan. Organisations all over the globe are ramping up their efforts to leverage their data in deeper, more impactful ways, from business intelligence to predictive and prescriptive analytics.

It is no surprise, then, that the data scientist role was in the top 5 of LinkedIn’s latest emerging jobs study. According to the company, data scientist jobs have experienced a 37% hiring growth over the past three years.

The key skills you should look for when hiring a good data scientist include machine learning, data science, Python, R and Apache Spark. However, as data analysis and predictive analytics are increasingly being incorporated into the decision-making process of companies, there is a growing need for data scientists themselves to understand the business.

A business-savvy data scientist eliminates the need for a middleman to translate data insights into business advice and transformation. Furthermore, as someone who can see both sides of the story, they can use data in more efficient and business-critical ways.

If you don’t have such a profile in your team, consider adding it.   

Also read our article: HR Managers: How to Assess the Technical Skills of IT Candidates

A true AI specialist

Often, data scientists are the ones taking over AI and machine learning duties within IT departments. Or at least being one of the main components of the AI team. That’s fine. A data scientist can, of course, become an expert in Ai through training and experience, but it’s not always the case. A true AI expert goes a bit further than the traditional data scientist, having mastered skills such as deep learning and natural language processing.

According to the same LinkedIn report, the AI specialist role has experienced a 74% hiring growth in the last 4 years. That is because hiring a true expert in AI can result in great benefits across several departments and processes within the organisation. AI can optimize operations, help with cybersecurity, come up with valuable customer insights and help you communicate better with your stakeholders by eliminating the lower levels of customer service. But it can do much more. If you have yet to explore this area, we recommend that you do.

A cloud cybersecurity expert

For some time, IT leaders were after all-terrain cybersecurity experts that understood the company’s whole IT ecosystem and could deal with a wide array of cyber threats and vulnerabilities. As the digital environment has grown more complex and cyber-attacks more sophisticated, that figure is no longer the ideal gatekeeper. As it happens with everything else in our economy, specialization is key.

With more and more companies moving their business-critical operations to the cloud ­­ —and with hybrid, public and private cloud models becoming more intertwined— attacks via cloud infrastructure are poised to hit a new high this year. Therefore, it is of vital importance that you look into hiring a cybersecurity expert that is exclusively dedicated to protecting your cloud real estate.

Also read ou discover our interview: Cybersecurity Career Tips From a Ballerina Turned Pentester

A DevOps engineer

A DevOps engineer is a team addition you should consider if you’re looking to optimize and speed up the software development lifecycle. With a silo-breaking mentality, DevOps engineers work to get different IT teams and processes integrated and create a workflow that’s beneficial for everybody.

They achieve so by using their deep understanding of automation tools to develop digital pipelines comprising all stages in the production cycle — From concept and testing to deployment and monitoring.

Their wholistic mindset also makes them great evangelists of DevOps philosophy across your whole team. Greater awareness of process integration and collaboration across teams can only be beneficial for everyone in the longer run.  

Interested in DevOps profiles? Read about this expert’s DevOps career story.

An RPA automation engineer

Not to be confused with the kind of automation implemented by a DevOps specialist, RPA automation deals with processes internal to the IT team, like ticket generation, and to the overall company. An RPA expert can be of tremendous help anywhere where time-consuming, repetitive tasks can be automated.

Think of all the time you could save across your organization by hiring an automation engineer that would lighten your employee’s workload so that they could dedicate themselves to more productive tasks. Definitely worth it.

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Growing your career: permanent & freelance IT Consultants

The 3 cloud specialists companies will chase

The 3 cloud specialists companies will chase
Let's discover what are the 3 cloud specialists companies will chase. What specific roles are going to be the most sought after?

Let’s discover what are the 3 cloud specialists companies will chase.  

Are you working in cloud or thinking of redirecting your career towards this rapidly expanding field? Well, you’re on the right track. About 83% of companies are expected to be in the cloud by the end of this year. That, coupled with the fact that the industry is experiencing a major skills shortage, means that greatness awaits those daring to venture into the cloudy unknown. Especially if you consider the increasing complexity of the cloud environment itself.

Need advice on how to start or develop your freelance consulting business in tech or IT? Need to start a new permanent or freelance assignment? Join Mindquest and get support from our team of experts.

Public, private and hybrid cloud

In the dawn of time, there was either the public or the private cloud. Then came the hybrid cloud, a mix of both public and private cloud that takes the best of both worlds.

Then, 2023 will be all about multi-cloud, the use of different cloud service providers to optimize business operations, lower costs and avoid vendor lock-in.  

Top 3 – Cloud specialists companies will chase

In a recent TechRepublic survey, over 67% of respondents said they’re currently using or planning to use services from multiple cloud vendors. If these stats hold true, the need for highly qualified cloud experts that can navigate the growing complexity will only increase.

So, what specific roles are going to be the most sought after? Nemertes Research CIO John Burke proposes the following three.

Cloud solution architect  

Firstly, ideally involved from the beginning in the design of a cloud strategy that suits the needs of the organization, a cloud architect is the one with the big-picture perspective. This is a vital attribute when pondering the strengths and disadvantages of different cloud providers and what workloads should be assigned to each one.    

Once the architecture is deployed, a cloud solution architect is responsible for monitoring its proper functioning and for looking into ways to optimize operations by continuously upgrading tools and services.

Cloud integration specialist 

Then, just to squeeze a bit more out of the architectural analogy, think of the cloud integration specialist as the construction manager. While the architect designs the building, the cloud integrator is in charge of ensuring its correct construction by managing and integrating the workflows of the many parties involved. In IT terms, that means integrating the myriad of tools, dataflows and workflows that collide in a multi-cloud environment.   

If you prefer being down in the trenches, involved in everyday operations, this might be the right role for you.     

Also read our article about Building the dream team for multi-cloud success

Cloud security specialist 

We’ve touched on this topic in other articles: when it comes to security, specialization is key. This is particularly true in a multi-cloud environment, where threats are especially difficult to detect and cauterize due to the disparities in response time and security tools that come from working with several vendors.

On top of that, and as we’ve seen in our cybersecurity predictions for 2020, the vulnerabilities and sheer amounts of data of the multi-cloud are just too many and too alluring for hackers to ignore. Attackers will be doubling their attempts to breach into company systems through the cloud. They will even leverage the cloud themselves to launch more cost-effective attacks with greater frequency. Rest assured — Cloud security experts will be in high demand.           

All in all, no matter what path you have chosen, or end up choosing in the world of cloud, this will be a land of opportunity for years to come.  

Also read ou articles: Data security : Is your cloud data secure? and Cybersecurity Careers Overview