Last week I hosted my first online chat in all long time, maybe 3+ years, on Managing Your Tech And Startup Career. This is something I do every year at MinneBar and tech user groups throughout the year.

This one was a lot of fun for me as it was not only tech professionals in Minneapolis/St Paul but marketing, sales and CxO’s in our area along with a number of tech and data pros from the Bay Area.

The original agenda I proposed was:

• What is the local job market like right now?
• Is this a good time to look for a new job?
• What's a reasonable salary increase year over year?
• Should I stay a developer or move into management?
• I'm thinking about moving to "FILL IN THE BLANK CITY", should I go?
• Why is there so much recruiter spam?
• How much personal info should I share with corporate/search firm recruiter?
• I’m not a tech person but want to work with a tech company, how do I get in one?

And then attendees asked a number of questions including one I always seem to ramble on waffling back and forth on and paraphrasing… specialist or generalist?

In all it went for about 45 minutes and below is the session uploaded to YouTube.

This was my first time using Zoom and while it went OK it’s clear I need some more practice with which screen is showing.

To those who asked questions… thank you. It’s always way more enjoyable to have interaction particularly when I can’t see you.

If you have questions or comments after listening to this please send me an email [email protected]

Here we go…

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A frequent question I get locally and nationally is “what’s going on in Minnesota?”.

After all the fall and winter events and conferences and leading into spring it’s time for me to give some clarity… I am putting together a summary of all of the info I have gathered over the past months, add in a bunch of reference points from national IT job and salary surveys and do a webinar.

This is my perspective from attending user groups, working with and recruiting for startups and tech companies, conversations with large companies about their recruiting strategies and speaking at local and national conferences.

When:

• March 1^st, 2017
• 1 pm CT

Cost:

• Free

To register click:

• Minnesota IT Jobs, Salary and Recruiting Report - Spring 2017

Topics:

• Intro
• What’s going on in MN
• Recruiters in demand
• Job and Skills info
• IT salary info
• Recruiting trends
• Conclusion

Who should attend:

• Corporate Recruiter or HR
• Hiring Managers
• Startup CEO
• IT Manager, Director or CIO
• IT professionals
• (Who am I missing?)

Q&A will be part of the webinar. Please interact with me.

If you have any questions ahead of time send me an email [email protected]

FYI… a few events this spring you may want to attend:

• 3/3 Tech Cities
• 3/25 MinneBar
• 3/30 Enterprise Rising
• 3/31 Midwest Capital Call

Save the Date:

• June (TBD): Midwest Recruiting Bootcamp
• 10/9-15 Twin Cities Startup Week
• 10/16-18 ERE Fall 2017 in Minneapolis

Click Minnesota Headhunter for current blog posts and Minneapolis IT Jobs for searches I am working on.

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Last week Kathy Grayson at the Minneapolis St Paul Business Journal posted this article Amazon’s cloud-computing arm shops for Twin Cities talent

There have been some interesting reactions to the news ranging from:

Why here - yes, we do have a lot of very good IT pros here & who are looking for something new

Who would want to move to Seattle - two words, polar vortex

Oh crap, we can’t compete with them – yes, yes you can

So let’s cover those briefly…

To those who say we do not have enough talented IT pros in town or that we can’t compete with groups on the coast I say this… BS

Too strong? I have a much stronger response that will likely offend a bunch of you.

So let me pull this from the article… this is a more polite way of saying it:

Scott Burns, CEO of growing St. Paul software company GovDelivery Inc., said he's not surprised Amazon is recruiting in Minnesota.

"Anyone from Amazon or from Google is wise to tap into this market. We have a lot of talent," he said. "We compete by making [GovDelivery] an awesome place to work."

This morning I had my 4^th of 6 meetings this month with Tech and HR leaders talking about recruiting strategies to fill their Minnesota IT Jobs in 2015.

I have a bunch of stats, salary ranges, news stories, etc. and then we get into some examples of groups doing this well and those… not so much. Everyone leaves with a skeleton plan on what to do and then they can fill it in to best suit their group.

During these conversations I have noticed that attendees fall into three categories:

- Those who in my opinion “get it”. They understand this is a competitive time and for the past couple of years have been putting time and/or money into their recruiting. They are looking to fine tune their strategy and make the engine run better and faster. 15% of the groups are in this category.

- Those who in my opinion don’t “get it”. They think recruiting is about posting a job on their career site and Craig’s List. They have a 6 cylinder engine running on 4.5, see the “check engine” light on and ignore it. 25% of the groups are in this category.

- 60% of the groups fall into “are trying”. They have a 10 year old car with a little rust on it. They get OK gas mileage but don’t have the extra horsepower in the engine to pass anyone. Sooner or later it gets them where they are going and they know that there are not many miles left. The car needs to be replaced.

Basic recommendations I have been giving to the last group:

Videos from MinneBar 9 are posted including my “Managing Your IT Career v6 - (Why do recruiters suck so bad?)”.

We had a fun conversation and I only had one slide with a few bullet points I wanted to talk about:

• I have an affliction
• Why do recruiters suck
• Hot IT skills
• Jobs scene
• Economy
• Negotiate $5 an hour ($10K a year)
• LinkedIn – Friend and Foe
• No Ninjas

Besides my points we covered other topics including:

Conputerworld has released it’s 100 Best Places To Work In IT and once again 3 Minnesota companies make the list.

And once again it is the same 3 companies: General Mills, Medtronic and Securian Financial Group.

How they made the list:

Fact… Minneapolis is a really large, small town. No “six degrees of separation” here. I think it is 2.5.

Last week I accepted an invite from a CIO to talk about my recruiting his people. I knew it was going to be a difficult conversation but I know him through a friend and was willing to “take it for the team”.

Yeah, not a good idea.

It was a brutal conversation. The kind where the coffee shop manager had to walk over twice and ask us to “keep it down”.

I’m not going to get into specifics of the conversation other than to say this (because I know you are likely wondering)… I was contacted by a team of developers through a common friend.

Let me say that again… they called me.

Whether I am talking with a Recruiter or HR pro, IT developer or CIO the most frequently asked question is:

What are the hot skills?

My Recruiter and HR friends are usually asking so they can figure out if they suck at recruiting or if the demand/competition is as intense as they think.

Developers are asking to know if they should be raising their rates/salaries and/or where the market is going with technology.

With the annual spring 2014 tech, recruiter and HR conferences over and A LOT of “War for Talent” and “Skills Shortages” conversations over the past weeks and months I decided this is a good time to sit down and put together a “what’s going on”  and "ewhat's next" with Minnesota IT jobs, salaries and recruiting.

This is my perspective from working with and recruiting for startups and tech companies and conversations with large companies about their recruiting strategies.

This gives me a unique view of the tech community.

I put together a summary of all of that info, added in a bunch of reference points from national IT job and salary surveys and put it on YouTube.

If you want a copy of the slide deck send me an email:

[email protected]

Here is the agenda I used:

• Intro
• Upcoming events
• What’s going on in MN
• Recruiters in demand
• Job and Skills info
• Salary info
• Recruiting
• Conclusion

If you are a startup CEO, in HR or a corporate recruiter, tech manager or CIO, coordinate a tech group or are an IT professional (did I leave anyone out?) and have questions, thoughts or comments send me an email.

This is the fun stuff for me… my version of being a nerd:

 

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I did it!!!

If you are a friend of mine or have had a conversation with me about Minnesota IT jobs or recruiting in Minnesota in the last say… five years, you have likely heard me say something like:

“(rant) I should just start posting jobs and help spread the word”

Well… check this one off the “to do” list:

Minnesota IT Job Board is live.

About time, right?

For now I am going to host it here as an extra page on Minnesota Headhunter until I know it has some traction and yes, I have a bunch of appropriate domain names. I’ve had them for many, many years.

The page is still a work in progress but I want to put it out there now so I don’t sit on it for another few weeks.

I do have the first 10 jobs posted.

At MinneBar 9 I did not do my “Recruiting For Startups” like I had the previous 3 years… I should have. I spent a good chunk of my day answering questions, giving advice and helping create recruiting strategies.

These are conversations I enjoy… I messed up by not doing the session.

Fortunately this topic fits under the “Black Box” program through Google for Entrepreneurs at CoCo.

What:

Recruiting For Startups

Who should attend:

Startup or early stage company CEO, CXO, VP/Dir of IT, Founder/Co Founders who do not have HR or a Recruiter on staff and are recruiting now or before the end of 2014.

When:

June 2^nd
6 - 8 pm

 

Far and away the most frequently asked question I receive is, “Hey, do you have time for coffee?”

I want to say yes but for starters… I don’t like coffee.

Seriously, I don’t.

For many Downtown Minneapolis or the Warehouse District where I spend most of my time during the work day is not convenient for many people.

And I do my best thinking when I am walking around be it by the river, lake or pacing on the phone. Sitting in a chair in a coffee shop is not where I do my best work.

So I have come up with an idea… do a monthly webinar with a “theme”.

I will pick some topics and questions to cover and rely on those who are attending to ask the questions they have as if we were having coffee.

During MinneBar a Java Developer tapped me on the shoulder and asked if I had a couple of minutes to give her some career advice.

What she asked is a common question right now with Java and .Net Developers:

Should I learn Ruby? (I think she was really asking should she become a Ruby Developer)

A simple question with a not so simple, short answer:

The easy answer is yes. Well, maybe. It depends.

The IT Recruiter in me who works mostly with startups and tech companies wants to say:

Yeah and what are you waiting for.

But it is not that easy.

Do I think that developers should learn new languages?

Absolutely.

A really good guy I have known for many years, “Startup CEO”, was wondering if he was over reacting to the following scenario:

Startup CEO was introduced to an entry level “Developer” going through a career change by a peer at a local consulting group.

CEO and his team had a couple of in depth interviews with Developer. They wanted to make sure Developer was going to be able pick up writing code at a decent pace. And they were more than willing to train him along the way.

This was a win-win for both parties.

CEO calls up Developer and gives him an offer. They cover salary, benefits and “woo” him a little.

Developer tells CEO he has another offer. CEO says he understands and needs to have a decision in a couple of days.

Developer sends a short email to CEO saying he has taken the other offer.

Dear Mr. or Ms. IT pro, are you a “jerk”?

Or a “brilliant asshole”?

Are you self-aware enough to know?

A few weeks ago I was in a room with a dozen or so VP of IT and CIO’s talking about how to grow the local IT talent pool, what the current demand is for different skill sets, we tried to predict what would be in demand and some other things.

Another topic was, do we hire for skill set and being able to code or do we hire for personality and we can train.

There were varying opinions with most leaning towards hiring for personality, culture fit and working on the skill set. The idea being technologies change but people… not so much.

One of the comments made was:

“I am tired of brilliant ass holes”

And everyone responded with a nod, giggle or “yep”.