Our MD Jason McNeill & Director of Operations Kevin Hearns sat down with John Walsh of the Business Post to discuss today's ICT landscape and market.
Working with a sourcing specialist can deliver individuals with the information and communications tech skills needed in business today
As businesses’ need for information and communications technology (ICT) professionals has grown, they have run up against a problem: getting the right people can be hard.
In figures published in June by Eurostat, the EU’s statistical agency, 59 per cent of enterprises in Ireland reported that they had “hard-to-fill” vacancies for IT specialists.
The problem is not confined to any one country, either. In February this year, Britain’s Chambers of Commerce found that eight out of ten firms were finding it difficult to acquire either skilled or unskilled workers. According to the Financial Times, meanwhile, Germany’s Chambers of Commerce and Industry (DIHK) reported that “more than half” of 22,000 companies surveyed had difficulty hiring people.
Across the EU, 62.8 per cent of enterprises have said they find it difficult to hire ICT professionals.
Jason McNeill, managing director of recruitment and placement consultancy Vantage, said the issue was real, but that it was nonetheless possible to find people to take on ICT roles.
“There is a global issue in terms of a shortage of IT staff, but we’re finding staff every day for our clients,” he said..
Why it is in the news: Following its acquisition by BIL Group, Vantage’s new management team wants to bridge the ICT skills gap faced by Irish businesses
While much discussion of recruitment pits employers and staff against one another, Hearns said that rather than seeing recruitment as a see-saw it was actually a virtuous circle: businesses engaged in digital transformation find themselves more attractive to skilled ICT professionals than they would have been in the past.
“Remote and hybrid working have created a lot of opportunities for people, and industries that previously were considered safer or less exciting than big tech are now doing innovative things that can attract talent,” he said.
Vantage, formerly known as Vantage Resources, has a long history in IT recruiting, staffing and resourcing, dating back to the company’s foundation in 1996. Following its 2021 acquisition by investment firm BIL Group, Vantage has a new management team led by McNeill and Hearns and is positioning itself as the go-to organisation for delivering tech skills.
Vantage works with clients to get the needed staff, whether contract-based, project-based or permanent, starting by assessing their needs.
“In terms of helping companies to get staff, where we start is understanding the need of the new hire. One of the first questions I ask is: ‘Is this growth, or are you replacing someone and, if you are replacing someone, why?’,” Hearns said.
Naturally, digital transformation has had an impact. Not only has it increased the attractiveness of companies, it has changed the nature of the skills needed.
“The move from traditional data storage from on-premise to off-premise and then into cloud has created a lot of opportunities. People are looking for new skills including cloud, and for skills in particular clouds such as Azure or AWS.”
Indeed, as technology becomes central to business, a wider definition of ICT means a wider range of jobs.
“Obviously you have development, which [requires] all sorts of core skills and particular programming languages, but you also have the architecture side of things, you have UI [user interface] and UX [user experience], you have testing, business analysis and even things like software sales. IT has simply become much more integral to companies.”
Getting people with these skill sets demanded an understanding of more than just recruitment, McNeill said, and Vantage’s understanding of deep tech meant they could find the right person for the job. “We’re experts in IT and we reduce your time to hire and time to start.”
Working for clients in both the private and public sectors, Vantage provides traditional recruitment services as well as executive search and creating entire teams to take on projects.
“We can do all sorts of service offerings: we can get a permanent person or a contact person, but some businesses want more than that. We’re putting together a team for a client at the moment and putting that team on-site,” he said.
Hearns said that the changing world, driven by accelerating tech, had even had an impact on recruitment itself, not least on Vantage.“Recruitment itself is a job that was, 15 or 20 years ago, a part of HR [human resources] and now it is a standalone function and composed of a lot of different sections; look at resourcing, for example,” he said.
In the longer term, he said, as ICT continued to expand its reach into the economy and wider society, more and more vacancies would come on stream. As a result, a strategic approach was required.
“I think more could be done with, and by, the government to encourage secondary schools and colleges, particularly in terms of showing girls the career options available in IT,” he said.