Let’s start 2010 with a slightly belated (we’re blaming the mysterious but brilliant snowman that appeared in our car park) but nevertheless heartfelt thanks to everyone we worked with in 2009.  Like the vast majority of our clients and candidates, the past 12 months were tricky for us.  In fact, for a while back there it was downright scary.

It's a snowman, it's weird, it's in our carpark, it wasn't us but it IS to blame.

Throughout it all we tried hard to keep up the advice, help and information for job-seekers via this blog; we know that we could have done more and that we could have posted more frequently and that we could have posted on a wider range of subjects.  We do have some interesting ideas lined up for 2010, and we hope you’ll keep coming back to find out about them.

So what of 2010?  If 2009 was the year of the apocalypse, then 2010 is a sort of job-seeking apocalyptia.  Much as Cormac McCarthy describes a barren, ravaged land in his utterly brilliant The Road (about to become a film, we believe), the tech job-seeking landscape is much, much changed from what it was 18 months ago.

Unlike The Road however, the situation is improving.  Successive rises in vacancy numbers over the last 5 months of 2009 have raised hopes that the worst is over (that’s if we just paper over the 20% drop in December, which we suppose is to be expected, given both the natural, seasonal variations and the weather conditions in the week in which we collected the data).

But what do we – from the frontline – expect to see in 2010?

Early Promise, Later Doubt
There’s no reason to expect anything other than a short-term continuation of the recent upturn.  Hiring still remains pretty much the exception rather than the rule, although there is absolutely no doubt that there is more confidence floating around the market.  More and more companies are revealing hiring plans which involve, well, hiring.  Don’t expect to see a return to the days of 2006 and 2007, but if you’re looking for something at the moment, you should see the volumes of new jobs growing over the next three months.

The second half of the year (or at least the bit after the General Election, whensoever that may be) is a lot less clear.  A number of things could happen at the macroeconomic level which will/could/maybe/might impact tech businesses significantly.  A hung parliament, a debt/gilt crisis, inflation, deflation, stagflation, double drop – these are all things that you’ll find people are talking about, and all are possible and potentially problematic for the prospects of tech job-hunters in 2010.  In all honesty, it’s probably worth worrying about none of them (unless you’re a politician, in which case we’d like to know what you’re doing about it please!) until and if any of them happen, but the main message we’re trying to get across is don’t assume that all is well forever and finding a new job (or even finding new staff) is going to be easy, because it’s not.

Competition means Differentiation
The hiring landscape in 2010 will continue to place very different demands on job-seekers.  If you’re using ineffective marketing strategies, being sloppy in your applications and not making enough noise in the market you’re going to struggle.  If you’re overly-reliant on one or two job-seeking strategies then you NEED to re-think.

It’s absolutely vital that you engage in a multi-stream job-seeking approach.  It’s even more vital that you make every single possible effort to differentiate yourself.  Clicking a few buttons on a job-site and attaching a generic CV isn’t enough in the economic wastelands folks, it really isn’t.  For a reminder of some key a strategies, take a look at a post we made a couple of months ago: http://idealpeopleblog.com/2009/10/29/tech-job-seeking-in-the-post-apocalyptic-economy/

Over the coming weeks we’ll be bringing you more on how to succeed in your job-search in 2010.   In the meantime, our offer of a free CV review still stands.

Take care out there folks!