Bridging the Skills Gap in Data Center, Cloud and IT Recruitment

The skills gap in the IT industry has become an increasingly pressing issue across the globe. The rapid development of innovations such as Software-Defined Networking (SDN), cloud enablement and the hybrid cloud are changing the business landscape. Though these newer and more complicated technologies are driving success in the industry, the push for innovation is effectively widening the talent gap due to the fact that companies are challenged to find workers with the appropriate experience.

Though the dynamic of hiring in technology industries is becoming more complicated, talent is still available if you know where to find it. Peter Hannaford, CEO and founder of Datacenter People, a worldwide recruitment firm for the data center industry, has unlocked the secrets to finding great talent in the age of the skills gap. When confronted with the Uptime Institute’s Annual Report statistic, which reveals 35 percent of respondents were experiencing difficulty finding qualified candidates, many industry players worried. Hannaford, however, remains confident in hiring due to a few key differences that set his firm’s approach apart from other methods, which often fall flat.

Hannaford emphasizes the importance of specializing the search for new hires. When looking for niche talents, niche searches are required. In truth, the best thing any business can do to locate proper personnel is to leverage professional resources that hire for a living. Datacenter People, over the course of their eight years in business, has developed a unique methodology and a highly researched database of specialized individuals to make finding appropriate employees easier. Unlike standard human resource teams that focus on people actively searching for jobs, Datacenter People creates a strategy that picks out what they call “passive high performance” individuals. In essence, proven professionals who are already employed and successful. From there, the open positions are advertised to this specific subset of people, frequently yielding better hiring success than the traditional method of searching among active job seekers. With this approach, Datacenter People provides a selection of marketable, highly skilled candidates to their client companies within a matter of weeks.