IT Contractor Jobs Market Downturn
Think of the silent victims hit by the awful IT contractor jobs market downturn.
There is one group of people who have been hit very badly during this savage IT contractor jobs market downturn. However, you do not hear anything from them.
Gone almost unnoticed during the worst downturn in the history of the IT industry is one group who have been decimated at least as much as contractors. One doesn‘t hear too much about their fate. Even if they did complain, they wouldn‘t get a very sympathetic hearing.
In fact there might even be a touch of schadenfreude or ‘what goes around comes around’ from contractors.
We are talking here about IT recruitment consultants as they call themselves, or the terser ‘agents‘ as they are called by contractors.
Many Have gone Bust
Companies have laid off great swathes of agents during the downturn. Quite a few agencies have gone bust during the downturn. They took some of their contractors money with them, but at least the contractors still had jobs. Also, they may even been able to get the bonus of going direct.
However, their companies simply made them redundant, presumably with no pay-off. They are silent victims of the IT Contractor jobs market downturn
They‘ve All Cut
I think that I can say confidently, that every single IT recruitment company has laid off some personnel during the downturn.
And when we are talking about cost cuts here, although there may be a building or two that can be disposed of, their greatest overheads have been staff costs. So, that is what they have been taking the knife to.
They are all doing it.
Some smarter agencies did it earlier in the downturn and some did it later. Some made their staff cuts early and so managed to increase profits recently.
There does appear to have been a little bit of recovery in the contractor market starting last summer.
These cost cuts have been mainly those people who you hear on the end of the phone (or used to) either telling you about a job or trying to spam contacts from you.
In Dire Straits
Many of those who used to work in the IT recruitment industry must be in dire straights by now. That’s especially as many of them were not much more than contractors anyway. They had a low base salary and most of their money coming in commission.
Even those who have remained in work must be suffering greatly. That’s becasue much of their commission has dried up and they are mainly living on just a low base salary.
It‘s a fair bet to say that the average income of agents has fallen even more than that of contractors.
Pretending to Have Jobs
What many contractors probably haven‘t realised that it is the most desperate of agents who call them pretending to have jobs for them in order to try to obtain some precious contacts from them.
It is those who are not able to hit their targets and who know that they are very vulnerable in the next round of job cuts. Every few months, for the last few years, they‘ve had to watch some more of their colleagues disappear.
It may not be just the threat of a few more colleagues disappearing. It could be that their whole company is going to go under and take them with it – without any redundancy money.
So spare a though of the unreported and silent victims of this terrible IT jobs market downturn.
