“Over 80% of CIOs say it is becoming increasingly difficult to find people with the right skills as over half of businesses plan to invest in the latest technologies this year, according to research.

IT professionals with technical skills in database management were in highest demand, according to 46% of CIOs.  Publicly listed businesses, large companies and those in London and the south-east of England are finding it the most difficult to get the right skills, said the survey.  Network administrators/engineers, Windows administrators, desktop support professionals and business intelligence experts are also in high demand” -- Computer Weekly

I wrote a blog post recently about how ‘easy’ people think recruitment is - and to be honest, I can understand why.  Without making such a sweeping statement; this rule can be applied to the 95% - but at Testing Circle, we like to think we are the 5%.

No candidate is ever ‘just a number’, we go above and beyond to understand our Client’s needs as well as the needs of their business, and most importantly - we genuinely care about everything we do.  We have a strong ‘Equal Opportunities and Diversity Policy’ - we don’t discriminate or ‘positively’ discriminate and we believe in only sending a candidate across if we are 100% positive they can perform the task.  We do not spam mail our entire database with roles that are completely irrelevant to their skill set, nor do we promise things we can’t deliver.  The point I’m trying to get at, is if more CIOs used smaller and more niche agencies, such as Testing Circle; those figures above may not be so high.

It sounds like some cheesy marketing ploy to tell you how amazing we are and how we can deliver everything you need - but honestly, we can’t.  We are not super human, nor are we miracle workers.  We can however promise to use the biggest and brightest talent in our Company, to do our very best in finding someone that fits your team - not only in their technical expertise, but their team and environment fit.  We don’t just see ‘Recruitment as Recruitment’ - we understand that finding the right person for the right job, has the ability to change a lot of lives.

So why not give us a try - our rates are very competitive and if we don’t find someone great for you, you don’t have to pay us anyway :)

“As every art form takes discipline and practice to look easy, every kind of work takes years of diligence to perfect. Recruiting is no different, but few professions look so simple.  It’s really hard to pass along a piece of paper, right?  You can almost hear hiring managers thinking to themselves, ‘Yeah, I’ll bet your fingers are really tired from dragging all those resumes from a folder into an email. Real hard work.’  Few jobs seem so easy to duplicate” -- Recruiter.com

This article was sent to me by a colleague, and it really is one of the most interesting pieces I’ve read about Recruitment.  It’s one of those moments where you read something, and wholeheartedly agree with everything written.  The idea of the article is to challenge the theory that Recruitment is ‘easy’ and give a little insight into the industry.

“You have to look at everything that comes before that identification to see the value of a good recruiter. A great recruiter creates the conditions for that magic luck to strike. They don’t talk to a lot of different people. They talk to everyone. They don’t want to know their clients or their company’s competitors. They want to know everything that’s happening at every company in their area. It’s a massive amount of work that requires constant rejection, failure, stress, and is compounded by the minutiae of job offers and the uncertainty of human emotion” -- Recruiter.com

I really think that you get out what you put in.  The more effort recruiters put in to understand their Clients, Companies and Candidates, the easier the placements will be...it’s a lot more about quality, and a lot less about quantity.

I highly recommend ready the article - it will give you a great insight into Recruitment!

“2012 should emerge as the year when the cloud firmly establishes itself within business practices, a poll of UK IT bosses shows, indicating a significant shift will potentially be required in IT workers’ skill-sets.

According to a poll of 250 IT decision-makers, more than a third believe that the role of the IT professional has changed in the last year and will continue to evolve over the coming 12 months” -- Contractor UK

Over the last couple of months, the Cloud has really established itself within the IT community - not only within business practise, but more commercially as well; with the launch of Apple’s already-very-popular iCloud.  It’s no surprise that more and more IT leaders will look for their current and future employees to have acceptance, understanding and knowledge of Cloud technology.  Hopefully we’ll see this technology spread to many different arenas, especially truly ‘business critical’ sectors such as medicine.  The less paperwork there is, the more medical professionals can work together and share information therefore making patient care more effective and efficient.

As an IT recruitment and solutions company, I think we are going to see more and more Clients wanting knowledge of Cloud technology as a prerequisite for potential hires - as it becomes a staple in day-to-day working life.

So the moral of the story is...the Cloud is here to stay!

"Britain’s labour market for contract IT staff actually expanded in the third quarter, a jobs site has shown, at odds with an agency body’s index for the period but in line with end-user optimism seen in the past few weeks.  Releasing quarterly data for IT roles, jobadswatch.co.uk showed that the number of adverts for freelance candidates on the UK’s major IT and multi-sector recruitment sites increased by 4.7 %” -- Contractor UK

Considering how unstable the Market is at the moment, I think this is a fairly positive shift in favour of the contractor.  I wrote a little while ago about how it’s a ‘contractors market’ at the moment, and these figures would seem to indicate the same.  As the Contractor UK article quite rightly says, contractors are often the first in the door when the hiring boom starts and sadly often the first out when there’s a lull.  A lot of contractors are also considering permanent placements at the moment, so it’s definitely a great way to scope out a company and see if you’re a good fit before potentially looking for a permanent career in either that location, or even just in that sector.

Chris White, Sales and Recruitment Manager at Testing Circle says “we are surprisingly busy in the run up to Christmas; the Market is a lot more buoyant than this time last year - with figures such as 40% more contract work than October/November 2010 and approaching the same amount for permanent.”  So, positive news all round!

IT contractors are increasingly confident about their job prospects in the financial services sector over the coming year, seemingly aware that banks and insurers are stepping up demand for temporary IT skills.  Issuing the verdict, Giant group said that almost a third of IT contractors think the City-dominated sector will create the most work for them over the next 12 months, compared with 28% this time last year” -- Contractor UK

Testing Circle can definitely confirm this story.  Some of our largest clients are in the financial sector, and we have seen a marked increase in the number of contracts being offered over the last few months.  Also noting that the majority of jobs will be City-based, we like this survey because it’s actually done by the contractors themselves, not just a third party.  They believe that the best chance they have of work is in the financial sector, as appose to relatively small numbers last year.

Hopefully this not only means that there’s more jobs for contractors, but also *fingers crossed* good news for the economy.  The need for more contractors would denote that there are more projects and more ideas being pushed through, which means there’s more funding, which in turn is being spent out and helping to boost the economy.

“Google may not have had much of a choice when it came to buying Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion. If it didn’t, someone else would have and that would have put the company in an even bigger patent hole.  Our sources say that Motorola was in acquisition talks with several parties, including Microsoft for quite some time. Microsoft was interested in acquiring Motorola’s patent portfolio that would have allowed it to torpedo Android even further. The possibility of that deal brought Google to the negotiation table, resulting in the blockbuster sale”

Of course everyone knows (unless you live under a rock) that Google has recently acquired Motorola.  At $12.5 billion, it was definitely expensive as purchases go, however it was obviously highly sought after if other huge Companies such as Microsoft wanted in on the action.

Apparently the deal was pretty ‘hush hush’, with only Google’s CEO Larry Page and Motorola’s CEO Sanjay Jha present for the majority of the deal, with a few executives brought in later on in the day.  According to Gigaom, Android’s co-founder Andy Rubin was brought in to the talks at the last minute.

I’m looking forward to seeing what is going to come of this recent deal, it will certainly be an interesting journey for all concerned!

“Over the weekend we saw the twentieth anniversary of the first website ever to be published.  A young scientist at CERN named Tim Berners-Lee worked on a better way to communicate and share research information stored on various computers through the CERN facility. The result was a browser and editor that could enable the sharing of information through a common hypertext language. This was the very first website, but certainly not the last” -- The Commentator

It’s amazing to think what people did before the Internet?!  It is pretty much a part of every person’s everyday life; we use it at home, and work and even the commute in between!  I can only imagine where the world of the Internet will take us in the future, so for now we’ll just say Happy Birthday and here’s to another 20 years!

““We are not trying to redefine the textbook,” Kno CEO Osman Rashid tells me, “we are trying to redefine how you learn.” Today, Kno is taking a big step towards making digital textbooks more social by making 100,000 college textbooks available both on its Website and on Facebook. The Textbooks for Facebook app and site will present the books via an HTML5 reader. So students who buy a book via Kno’s iPad app, can now read them online or on Facebook. They can post study questions and comments to their news feeds, with an eye towards creating full-fledged study groups down the line” -- TechCrunch

I’m really excited that the use of textbooks in schools is being expanded to the internet which in turn will be available on phones, laptops, iPads and more.  It seems as though there will be a way that students can ask questions and get answers online, learn and more importantly SHARE their learning with each other.  Plus with cloud computing, they will be able to access their textbooks through several different mediums.

The easier we make learning, the more young people are going to want to do it - plus it’s light and portable!  I remember lugging around an entire backpack full of books when I was younger, but children in the future will just be able to carry around their iPad or Laptop and have all their textbooks at the touch of a button!

I can’t wait to see where this technology takes us; nowhere but up!

“Bill Gadja (Visa’s Global Head of Mobile) explains that there are three prongs to Visa’s mobile payments strategy. One of these is NFC, and focuses on payments using a mobile phone at a physical store. For background, NFC (near field communications) enables people to make transactions, exchange digital content and connect electronic devices with a simple touch. As we’ve seen with Google Wallet, Android phones such as the Nexus S are being built with NFC chips, making your cell phone a mobile wallet. Visa recently joined the ISIS network, a NFC mobile payment network that is a joint venture formed by AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon. ISIS will soon launch in a number of markets, including Utah and Texas” -- TechCrunch

Amazing idea.  I literally cannot wait to have this!  I’m sure it poses several security issues, but overall I think Visa is going to do amazingly well with this new technology.  As an avid shopper myself, and seldom ever carrying cash, it would be so handy to be able to ‘pay’ with my phone.  Thus also eliminating the need to even carry a purse/wallet around at all, which may reduce criminal activity such as pick-pocketing because people aren’t carrying cash or cards.

The technology behind this latest breakthrough must be pretty phenomenal, and as much as I don’t agree with technology taking over the world, this is one of those instances where it will really aid everyday life.  I’m sure lots of people were adverse to the ‘chip and pin’ when it first came out, but now everyone is used to it, it turned out to be a handy and helpful part of the shopping experience.  I hope this will become a great addition to the way we shop; after all that’s what great technology is supposed to do - assist but not take over everyday life.

“After the solid Q2 earning on July 20, 2011 Apple shares surged so much so that it is now worth more that Microsoft, Intel and Yahoo combined put it another way it is bigger than Google, Cisco, HP and Adobe combined.  Apple once left for death has been experiencing phenomenal growth with the iPod, iPhone and iPad, and its shares have been explosive.  Apple is up 20% year-to-date, Google is up 4% year-to-date and the rest of them Cisco, Yahoo and HP are 20%. The average tech stock is down 10% for the year” -- WebGuild

Congratulations to Apple who have basically exploded all over the place with their amazingness!  I don’t think I know a person who doesn’t have either an iPhone, iPad, iPod or a Mac, yet still it shocked me seeing this in cold hard facts.  Being bigger than Google alone would be incredible enough, but being bigger than Google, Cisco, HP AND Adobe is something else entirely.  Well done Apple!