Market update….

So as you may have noticed I haven’t had much time to update my blog these days.  This is a good thing for all of you job seekers out there.  The reason is that I have simply been recruiting all out for open positions.  This week alone my team and I came across 25-30 open positions.  Despite many of these companies still watching their budgets and plans to do the recruitment on their own the fact they are opening positions is in itself a sign of things to come.

We have noticed that certain types of positions however are still very difficult to fill – even in a market with such a high volume of candidates and applicants.  This is evident as corporations are still looking to search firms in an attempt to find the best candidates for these openings.

One of these positions we are being employed to provide searches for is Java developers with e-commerce experience.  Although we seem to see a large number of Java candidates on the market with a Financial background it seems the number of candidates with e-commerce specific experience is limited.

A second type of candidate in high demand will have a solid LAMP development background.  PHP/Python/Perl programmers have become more desirable with corporations making choices to cut cost on development projects by going with open-source solutions.  Companies specializing in advertising and marketing consulting seem to have been less effected by the current job market and many of these types of businesses provide their clients with open-source solutions – leading to an increase in demand as corporations begin to put their advertising budgets back into play.

We have also noticed an increase in the usage of Ruby and Ruby on Rails.  This is a language that is still pretty new to the development community and thus has yet to establish itself  a high number of “specialists”.  It has recently been gaining momentum and we believe will only become more popular as the year goes on.

This influx of open positions is hopefully a sign of the market coming back around.  With the DOW managing to creep back in the right direction it has begun to create a feeling of confidence among Boston businesses which should continue to lead to increased hiring in all areas!