RECRUITING IS EXPENSIVE. FIND THE TALENT THAT DOESN’T LEAVE.One-stop shop IT technology and staffing companies are better than just staffing focused companies.

Executive SummaryWhile the staffing industry is a people business, one-stop-shop IT technology and staffing firms are on a constant mission to put more people to work with the assistance of technology. In order to provide real business value and efficient talent solutions, these companies must walk the walk and talk the talk.

With abundant choices of staffing companies in the market, IT staffing firms continue to drive end-to-end solutions for temporary and permanent staffing using a technology-centric approach that ensures an exceptional candidate experience every time. The ones that follow agile methodology also drive operational efficiencies such as automating manual, paper-heavy tasks; filling job orders with record speed and ease; ensuring compliance; and more. These firms provide more flexibility than staffing-focused companies.

Staffing agencies should therefore invest in tools to facilitate remote work and collaboration, evaluate their existing physical and mental capacity to maintain remote work, execute intermittent network strain testing, and spot workarounds for important home tasks that are not processed from home. Agencies must carefully plan different strategies, including overcoming hurdles with interchangeable delivery chain vendors or inter-affiliate subcontracts and formulating plans about areas of high physical interference and attentiveness risks.

Good IT staffing firms partner with the existing Human Resources team, so it can be worthwhile to find and appoint the right developers on their behalf. By collaborating with an IT staffing firm, companies can increase their setup of existing applicants for full-time, on contract to hire, provisional staffing, and advisor roles. Companies in mid-market and larger companies now prefer partnerships with IT staffing firms thanks to the easy management of their HR, technical, and software workforces.

IT jobs were predicted to rise 22% in 2020, with needs for software developers estimated to rise from 28% to 32%—it’s obvious that IT serves as a basic constituent in a business’s accomplishments.

Introduction 4

Candidate Sourcing 6

The Unique Value of Trust and Information 6 in Staffing

IT Is the Future of the Staffing Industry 7

Technological Change Is Rapidly Shifting the 8 IT Staffing Industry

Why IT Staffing Firms Outperform Staffing-Focused 9 Companies

How Do Good IT Staffing Firms Add Value? 11

IT Staffing Strategies - Making the Best 13 Possible Hires

Qualifications 14

Screening Process 14

IT Staffing Approved Vendor 15

Invest in Technology and Infrastructure to Support 15 Remote Work

Benefits 16

IT Staffing Challenges Before the Pandemic 16

IT Staffing Challenges After the Pandemic 17

Conclusion 18

About Amzur Technologies, Inc 19

Table of Contents

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IntroductionChallenges and priorities may be shifting for enterprise planners and human capital managers in procurement and HR. There is a relatively new digital shift toward remote-based sourcing and managing of contingent workforce/services—this new business environment is both highly uncertain and subject to new constraints. As we are experiencing the coronavirus pandemic and stay-at-home orders, companies are keeping supply chains, distribution centers, and last-mile delivery networks staffed and operating; managing help desk/customer service center volume peaks; filling critical gaps when employees or temp workers aren’t available, etc. As employees’ safety becomes critical and demand shifts to remote work, the long-term effects may unfold over the next few years. Many organizations believe they have the tools required to make remote work effortless, but IT departments may need all new standards for isolating workers and guaranteeing their online safety when the next global crisis occurs, whether it is another pandemic or some other disruption. According to Guy Berger, a principal economist at LinkedIn, IT firms are showing more flexibility than other companies by staffing up to maintain the infrastructure for huge remote workforces.

As state governments start the open economies back up after an unprecedented slowdown, a great deal of support work will be required for a limited period of time to manage information, review policy/procedures, plan for returning employees, etc. Demand will increase for a range of services providers (from maintenance to IT security), creating supply gaps and necessitating alternative approaches to candidate sourcing services. Staff augmentation requirements in data science, artificial intelligence, robotic process automation, cloud computing, and Internet of Things may be significant and specific. These conditions will vary across different business segments and geographies.

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In the Conference Board’s best-case scenario (May reboot), the economy will return to Q3 2019 output levels by the end of 2020. In its worst-case scenario (Fall recovery), output will only reach 97% of Q3 2019 levels at the end of this year. But many concerns persist about the future.

In the next few months, businesses will configure their needs for labor, skills, and expertise and decide how to fulfill immediate and short-term business requirements under significant uncertainty. Some employees may continue to work from home. During this time, companies may need to complete short-term or once-in-a-lifetime projects, and for those they will need IT talent resources with niche technical skills. This could mean charting unknown waters. It could mean establishing relationships with new staffing service providers.

The Conference Board developed three possible U.S. domestic economy recovery scenarios as seen in the graphic below:

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At many companies, HR may be overwhelmed with managing the permanent employee workforce and the changes in corporate policies and external regulations. An unshared burden falls on procurement and its role in contingent workforces and services. The threat of coronavirus does not mean hiring has stopped or candidates aren’t actively looking for placements; chances are that many sourcing professionals and HR managers are sourcing candidates online. They are using social media, online job portals, advanced ATS or recruitment software, as there’s very little contact with the candidate beyond phone calls and emails. Digital interviews are an absolute win in this situation. Beyond the interview phase, contact with the candidate would typically cross over from the digital world to ensure you get to know them, but now employers are worried about COVID-19.

The real value here is in the interview questions. Say you’re hiring for an IT project. Will an HR expert know which questions to ask to evaluate an IT professional’s expertise over video conferencing? Or will this require an expert in IT industry sourcing?

Candidate Sourcing

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- Sam Velu, Director of Accounts, eTeki

We have been used to giving candidates a memorable and professional experience at every touch point, but with stay-at-

home orders, this practice has escalated and will be the core standard in the industry as digital practices become more common across the board.

Traditionally, staffing companies delivered people to businesses for a fixed duration in addition to filling their vacant positions. This could be seen as recently as 2019, when industry profits were still rising and U.S. unemployment rates were low. But even then, organizations were becoming more comfortable with hiring temporary workers to enhance their on-hand workforces. Now, with unprecedented levels of remote work and unemployment in the wake of COVID-19, the resilience of IT companies is becoming even more obvious.

IT IS THE FUTURE OF THE STAFFING INDUSTRY

IT solution vendors use technology to inspect resumes, compare keywords, and more to match an applicant to an open post. Well-informed job placements show that the IT staffing organization understands the needs and requirements of all parties. Moreover, organizations have a right to use the information on customer staffing plans, so for applicants, exploring the job becomes more than just examining the “facts” of the position.

It is common to hear a company claim they can spotlight and source a good IT candidate within a single day, but the process of searching for, interviewing, and selecting candidates takes time. Even someone without staffing experience can see the contradiction in the misconception that the process of pre-qualifying candidates should be both manual and effortless. Most staffing companies sort through thousands of resumes across multitudes of job boards in seconds. Sometimes these platforms are based in artificial intelligence, giving recruiters the ability to quickly import prospects’ profiles from professional networks and easily parse and import candidates, saving hours of time from manual sourcing.

THE UNIQUE VALUE OF TRUST AND INFORMATION IN STAFFING

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The effects of quarantine are kicking in, and recruitment during COVID-19 is not the same as before. In times of quarantine, remote work has always been a societal necessity. In a few years, staffing-focused firms will be dependent on web-based programs and software to provide simpler and more efficient tracking of applicants. ATS with full CRM functionality not only enables electronic recruitment and hiring but also creates meaningful and stable interactions with candidates. Two-way video interviewing will become the norm. Branded, personalized, and mobile-friendly job boards and applications might become a thing of the past as digital processes drive agility. Paperless mobile onboarding will be expected. Hiring companies will start expecting agile turnaround times in placements and full visibility into all key parts of your business life cycle, including sales, marketing, recruiting, operations, and payroll/billing. Organizations will need to be capable of utilizing programs to generate new applicant openings, make a schedule for interviews, evaluate results, and screen resumes with no difficulty. For example, firms are already capable of taking interviews online using web chat or video and asking candidates to show their skills.

TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE IS RAPIDLY SHIFTING THE IT STAFFING INDUSTRY

According to Candor, which released an extensive overview of more than 1,700 businesses, 60% of those businesses are reporting hiring freezes during the impact of coronavirus. Among those, it is clear that software development companies, although strongly affected, seem to be in the best spot when it comes to their hiring-to-layoffs ratio.

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More than 3 million provisional and contract workers work for America’s staffing companies during a normal week. Staffing workers perform jobs in almost all professions and sectors:

Nine out 10 staffing workers declare they were satisfied with their staffing company.

Why IT Staffing Firms Outperform Staffing-Focused Companies

in office–accounting and administrative

in expert-managerial in healthcare28% 13% 9%

in engineering, IT, and scientific

in industrial13% 37%

Very satisfied

Extremely satisfied

33%

41%

Somewhat satisfied

Not very satisfied

18%

5%

Not at all satisfied

3%

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With IT jobs predicted to rise 22% in 2020 and the need for software developers estimated to rise from 28% to 32%, it is clear that IT serves as a basic constituent in a business’s accomplishments. Companies are expected to employ the top technical ability available.

This statistic shows the number of workers in the IT segment in the U.S. from 2010 to 2019. In July 2019, the number of workers in this segment was at about 2,826,000.

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They contact brand new applicants, so you’re not contacting the same ones again and again. Good IT staffing agencies have large networks of applicants, so they’re all set to shift when the ideal job pops up. But they also know how to reveal new talent groups, so you don’t sit in the same talent pool for months on end. You just have to identify how and where to discover them.

Although the goal of both recruiter and hiring manager is to find the best possible candidate for a role, a lack of understanding and communication between the two about needs and expectations can lead to poor candidate experiences. This negative recruiting experience can compromise an employer’s ability to attract top-quality candidates.

According to a stat by ICIMS, 51% of recruiters said hiring managers should do a better job of communicating what they are looking for in a candidate and provide reliable examples.

Organizations face a variety of sourcing and recruiting challenges, including:

• Talent shortages

• Poor communication between HR and hiring managers

• Poorly written job descriptions

• The inability to use data for decision-making

• Poor candidate experience

HOW DO GOOD IT STAFFING FIRMS ADD VALUE?

According to talent assessment platform Mercer-Mett’s report on the “Top Challenges in Sourcing and Talent Acquisition,” 74% responded that talent acquisition was a challenge in 2019. The report was concluded after the survey of more than 900 decision-makers, who revealed that finding and hiring the best candidates for various roles is a tough and expensive process.

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This may become more of a problem due to COVID-19. According to a LinkedIn survey,

58% of talent acquisition (TA) professionals said that a major impact of coronavirus was the transition from in-person interviews to virtual ones. More than half (54%) of the TA professionals in LinkedIn’s recent survey believe that their companies will make fewer offers.

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At companies that still do their own recruitment and hiring, human resources and business managers trying to fill open positions are largely left to figure out what the jobs require and what the ads should say. It is assumed that the human resources experts prepare detailed job analyses to determine what tasks the job required and what attributes good candidates should have. Next they did job evaluation to determine how the job fit into the organizational chart and how much it should pay, especially compared with other jobs. At other times, without analyzing the data, they simply open positions to meet the requests made by department heads for seasonal demands shifts. Ads are designed and posted, and applicants apply. Then comes the task of sorting through the applicants. If there is one position, when applications come electronically, the applicant-tracking software sifts through keywords that the hiring managers want to see. Additional sorting spans to skills tests, reference checks, maybe personality and IQ tests, and extensive interviews to learn more about the candidates as humans. It is not just about patching a need but also making sure there is a possible vulture fit when it comes to staffing when conducted directly by human resources professionals.

When done in bulk for positions at various locations and levels, IT Staffing vendors are used. Some companies may have more than three or four vendors. These staffing vendors offer an astonishing array of smart-sounding tools for the right employee fit. They use artificial intelligence, voice recognition, body language, clues on social media, and especially machine learning algorithms.

The successful IT staffing vendors:

• Are truthful to their company’s brand while boosting applicants

• Learn about the recruitee's experience while informing them about their own company

• Are transparent about the impact on the return of the experience

IT STAFFING STRATEGIES - MAKING THE BEST POSSIBLE HIRES

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IT staffing vendors send more applicable posts, appealing to more applicants. Time-poor, overstretched internal human resources (HR) teams don’t always have an efficient way to screen the CVs and online profiles of many applicants. For this reason, computerized, AI-enhanced CV selection tools are present.

It’s a challenge, but the right firms recognize how to connect externally sourced, new IT engineers and developers without being overly assertive or persistent.

An integrated approach helps new employees by ensuring a stress-free adjustment to their new work and community environments. But some companies, hindered by lockdown orders, have temporarily given up on onboarding while others have reduced it to online documents or canned videos. As a result, onboarding programs will need to be converted into virtual experiences—a change Amzur Technologies has already made.

Beyond the transitional phase as economies reopen, the logistics and provision of remote and online staffing and customer experience will become “business as usual” in the years to come. This will be a challenge for companies that value face-to-face meetings more than virtual connections. Can the culture transition to online? With more hiring freezes coming, what would be the best use of a recruiter’s time in a virtual environment where online staffing takes less time?

QUALIFICATIONS

SCREENING PROCESS

There is a shift in trends as most companies use a funneling approach to selection. Common initial screening devices include resumes, application blanks, informal meeting and/or phone interviews and reference checks, which are generally used to identify and exclude poor performers from further consideration in the life cycle. These initial screening devices have a useful place in the overall selection process.

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We have already established why agencies should invest in tools that facilitate remote work and develop careful strategies for putting changes into motion.

Agencies should also authenticate that contracts among country-to-country affiliates are in a position to decrease doubt of terms, charges, expenses, and authoritarian requirements; data-sharing assets are addressed in the contracts, and, as necessary in synchronized industries, suitable licenses are inserted to carry out the extra work. Furthermore, away-from-the-source dependencies should be measured. For example, if a service provider is in an impacted area, capabilities in other regions that could be rapidly assembled should be considered.

INVEST IN TECHNOLOGY AND INFRASTRUCTURE TO SUPPORT REMOTE WORK

Big agencies have steady recruitment requirements, and you have the staff. Receiving an IT staffing official vendor list depends on trustworthiness and association potential, not on being a high-ranking person in the company, having all the associations, or having a brand everyone appreciates. What’s going to encourage decision-makers to grant you a spot on the chosen vendor list is the association you have with people.

At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter whether you’re a national, multi-office organization or a boutique IT staffing firm—you need to prove your trustworthiness by developing key associations. It is important to show that potential.

IT STAFFING APPROVED VENDOR

Because most data scientists seem to know so little about the context of employment or staffing, their tools are often built on models on attributes of the “best performers” in workplaces and then identifying which job candidates have the same attributes. They may use facial expressions, word choice, comments on social media, knowledge or soft skills assessment, and so forth. But a failure to check for any real difference between high-performing and low-performing employees on these attributes limits the screening tools’ usefulness.

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• Staff leaving due to better salary packages or a nearer job. It's unusual for a worker to depart a corporation for a lower-paying occupation.

• Demands on capable applicants, e.g., company culture.

• Overwhelming stress among IT professionals if their requirements or needs are not fulfilled.

• Low output is a destroyer in any industry. The experts need to make sure the candidates have a comprehensive understanding of what their job necessitates, clearing up the rules and policies of the company.

• If a company's reimbursement package fails to address its workers’ physical condition and monetary potential, it risks losing its best workers to agencies with a more comprehensive package. High expenses from job postings, call-up fees, expenditures to instruct the new employee, and time spent in the interview.

By collaborating with an IT staffing firm, agencies can improve their sourcing and recruiting outcomes for a variety of roles. To achieve the best results with an IT staffing firm, recruiters must make the entire hiring process more efficient and direct. Only then can they maintain your company’s success.

IT staffing services also have a positive impact on the work of the skilled IT experts you hire, resulting in superior system structural design, cybersecurity, business investigation, project supervision software development, and more.

Benefits

IT Staffing Challenges Before the Pandemic

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Never before has there been a need to track disease symptoms in potential candidates in an ATS. After coronavirus, will there be a need to do so? Recruiting events have been postponed or cancelled. Onsite interviews have been scrubbed. Drug tests and so-called “wet signatures” are nearly impossible to get within the companies and industries that require them. In-person onboarding is not possible due to social distancing. Some of the other challenges we foresee include:

• Lack of motivation with remote work: Not everyone will be suitable for remote work and this may not be obvious in the interviews. The way employees motivate each other in an office setting is quite different from how it can be done online.

• The pandemic will most likely make the search for the right talent more difficult. Do you have the tools to take advantage of global recruitment?

• Most people will be avoiding travel for the foreseeable future, and the talent a recruiter needs might be looking for work across the U.S. Being open to the long-distance remote-work model can help hiring managers build the team with the right talent for the right job.

• Hiring freezes

• Reinvesting recruiting time efficiently

• Transitioning to remote work in staffing and recruitment

• Getting recruiters to successfully recruit at home (maybe for the first time)

IT Staffing Challenges Afterthe Pandemic

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The demand for IT staffing is predicted to continue increasing in 2020. Digitizing recruitment, leveraging virtual meetings, forging online connections, and maintaining conversations with promising talent placements will be a part of your future. The COVID-19 pandemic will eventually pass—we don’t know when, but we do know that recruitment doesn’t have to grind to a halt. If anything, when this outbreak ends, employers will have very little time to hire candidates and position themselves for the next phase of growth. IT staffing vendors will be faster in providing talented technology and domain experts because they have already been doing it. They have been remote. They have been using interviews as a platform for staffing. Video conferencing and chat bots are already a part of their “business as usual.” While most staffing companies lack pre-screening tests and further onboarding and training procedures, these vendors have been on the digital forefront delivering not just IT staffing services but also comprehensive solutions, moving companies toward digital transformation.

Due to COVID-19, the need to work remotely is increasing, and IT staffing firms are offering different strategies and plans to overcome this situation. These vendors use a holistic approach to ensure you find the right person for the right job. Although there are some challenges that even IT staffing firms face during this time, these challenges have little impact on standardized practices and do not lessen the benefits provided by easier management of workforces, technology, and software. Statistical analysis also describes the value of IT recruitments in the U.S. and across the globe. According to those statistics, IT staffing firms attract a larger number of managers for partnership and achieve higher ranks in the business world than staffing-focused firms.

Conclusion

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Amzur's mission is one of mutual success. As a trusted IT partner at every stage in the digital transformation lifecycle, we deliver holistic talent staffing strategy, customer-centric consulting services, and a logical path forward for our clients. Based in Tampa, Florida, with a workforce of 300 across two countries, Amzur offers product development and software engineering services ranging from Distributed Energy Resource (DER) consultation and coordination to NetSuite Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) implementation at a size and scale that provides optimal flexibility. But our expertise also spans the Internet of Things, Product Engineering Services, Robotic Process Automation, and so much more.

We provide a transparent-margin business model 100% risk-free, delivering better talent and value to our clients. We approach each client relationship as a partnership, and we take great pride in meeting the needs of our clients quickly and accurately. We ensure the highest quality candidates with our intensive pre-screening and pre-qualification processes, measuring technical and interpersonal fit for each position at our clients.

Amzur offers a two-step selection method to make sure applicants are paying attention to the task and appealing to our customers. If our sourcing team finds a good applicant profile, they request a CV and then schedule a call with the manager.

It’s difficult to evaluate soft skills and culture fit without an interview; that’s why we added the second step. Effective IT staffing firms create dynamic partnerships with existing human resource teams, allowing you to find and appoint the right developers on the agency’s behalf.

About Amzur Technologies, Inc

https://www.cio.com/article/3532812/covid-19s-impact-on-the-enterprise-and-remote-work.html

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/23/tech-companies-pull-back-on-hiring.html

https://calltsg.com/staffing-industry-evolution/

https://medium.com/the-future-of-staffing/what-is-the-future-of-the-u-s-staffing-industry-72a5f85eb841

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https://www.statista.com/statistics/199979/number-of-employees-in-the-us-information-sector/

https://nederlia.com/technical-recruitment-agencies-add-value-sourcing-process/

https://blog.zoominfo.com/it-staffing-approved-vendor-list/

https://www.ey.com/en_gl/covid-19/covid-19-and-pandemic-planning--how-companies-should-respond

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https://sparksgroupinc.com/staffing-agency/

Bengi Lynch Director of Marketing, Amzur Technologies, Inc.

Sam Velu Director of Key Accounts, eTeki

Rani Nemani President, Amzur Technologies, Inc.

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