Declaring it a “a good job market for technology professionals,” IT career site Dice.com says the pace of tech hiring will accelerate for the balance of the year.
According to the semi-annual Dice hiring survey, 73% of the 1,000 IT recruiters and hiring managers said they expect to be adding IT professionals in the second half of 2013. That’s a 14% bump from the hiring expectations at the beginning of the year.
One in five employers say they’re planning substantial increases in their IT staffing; 54% say the increases will be slight.
More of that hiring will be fulltimers (45%) and contract workers (44%), say the surveyed employers. Only 27% expect more staffing; 51% see no change.
With tech recruiting already a contact sport — more than a few developers report getting upwards of a dozen recruiting calls a month — even a slight increase in the hiring rate means even greater difficulty in filling reqs and more upward pressure on salaries.
So far, though, there’s no evidence it’s taking longer to fill jobs, though there has been a change in how candidates are reacting to offers. More are now turning them down. When the issue is salary, almost a third of the respondents to the survey say candidates want at least 5% more than the initial offer; 14% say they’re more than 10% apart.
The Dice survey did find employers saying time to fill IT positions hasn’t changed much, in fact more now say it’s actually gone down: 22% in the current survey versus 17% saying that at the beginning of the year.
“The biggest jumps in hiring intentions were from those with company headquarters in the Midwest, West and East, including the Northeast,” said Tom Silver, SVP, Dice.com. “Each market has its own unique story, but in the end, it’s just a good job market for technology professionals.”