IT Hiring Trend Creates a Contracted Work Takeover

There are times in every person’s life when he or she finds it difficult to commit to something. For chief information officers, those instances may often pop up when it comes to hiring full-time staff members.CIOs tend to feel some pressure in terms of tracking down the right information technology professionals to join their departments. They want to ensure that they select candidates that would be good fits for the individual roles that these future employees will have to play.On top of that, IT executives aim to create a generally strong team that is capable of collaborating on projects and carry out tasks in an effective manner. They have to accomplish all of this, while still sticking to the recruitment budget.For this reason, CIOs are well aware that there is a lot riding on their hiring decisions. As of late, these clever tech executives have started to switch up their strategies and take a different approach to their staffing methods.Tight budgets promote widespread contractingAccording to CIO.com, IT recruiters are still wary of any lingering economic uncertainty stemming from the Great Recession. Despite their own sector’s success and rapid growth, CIOs are not too quick to become overly confident with their seemingly stable financial state. Instead of taking on a whole slew of full-time representatives, of which a number of companies are in need, tech executives are opting to contract work.”Based on my recent interviews of 84 CIOs over the last two weeks, we see that CIOs have become more cautious,” Victor Janulaitis, CEO of IT consulting firm Janco Associates, told the news source.Businesses are starting to raise the bar with regards to their tech expectations. By incorporating more and more innovative solutions throughout their operations, companies may be finding that they have to expand their IT departments so that they are equipped to manage all of the new tools they’re using.”They all need larger budgets and staff to deal with this but are reluctant to hire new, full-time employees,” Janulaitis explained to CIO.com.Corporate executives are not too keen on the idea of shelling out more money to cover the rising salary and benefit expenses that would come with hiring more full-time staff members. Because of this, a growing number of companies are keeping their budgets tight and their workforce generous by contracting projects to IT professionals.This decision to focus on employing more outside contractors appears to be spreading throughout the tech industry at a rapid rate. Not only are more companies within the sector planning on taking on contractors, but also individual firms are hoping to increase the number of independent workers they may already have on staff.Independent professionals surpass full-time employeesA recent survey conducted by Mondo, a tech consultancy company, revealed that this new staffing trend is quickly gaining speed. The poll found that 48 percent of businesses expect to hire more contractors than full-time employees in a year from now. This means that just under half of American CIOs intend to phase out their use of salaried staff members in favor of bringing in an increased number of independent IT professionals.The majority of the projects outsourced to contractors may be linked to more recent innovations adopted by companies, according to Mondo’s research. At the moment, 73 percent of tech departments assign freelance professionals with work that requires them to modify or manage the latest tools in the IT world. Tasks delegated to contractors include everything from application development to mobile maintenance.”We are entering the era of the elastic workforce and businesses want to have access to experts and hard to find talent, when they need it, without taking on new overhead,” explained CEO of Mondo Michel Kirven. “By leveraging IT contractors, CIOs and CMOs are empowered with access to the right resources at the right time and can dedicate the proper skills to the task at hand.”In light of this, it is no wonder why 32 percent of organizations reported that they plan to increase the amount of funds that they dedicate to contracted work. Because these staffing practices appear to be more cost-efficient, not to mention useful to companies implementing new technologies, they are beginning to surpass full-time recruitment.