Tech Hiring Slows Down, Especially Outside Tech Hubs
The pandemic economy is hurting tech job postings, according to data released by job hunting site Indeed. Since mid-May, tech job postings have trended below overall job postings and for weeks have remained approximately 36 percent below last year’s trend.
In a blogpost Indeed Hiring lab economist AnnElizabeth Konkel attributed the decline to tech industry’s high cost of hiring and firing. “While a restaurant may take on workers based on demand experienced over the past two weeks, sectors like tech have much longer planning horizons," she said.
Through July 24, the overall job postings trend in all of the eight "tech hubs" of the US — San Francisco and the East Bay, Silicon Valley, Seattle, Austin, Baltimore, Boston, Raleigh and Washington DC — was down more than the 21% decline in overall postings nationally. The gap is widest in Raleigh, where the overall postings trend was down 26 percent from a year ago, while tech job postings were off 45 percent.
Indeed Hiring lab economist AnnElizabeth Konkel explained why in a blogpost, “This may be because more-established tech companies, which often are sited in tech hubs, are more likely to have the financial resources to ride out a crisis. The poorer performance of non-tech hubs reverses the previous tendency, in which smaller tech centers had been gaining on the eight hubs. Amid great uncertainty about coronavirus, tech companies may be pushing for centralization in major hubs rather than dispersion.
Indeed parsed through 564 tech-related job titles and found that data science was the hardest hit, with up to 51percent fewer jobs advertised compared to a year ago for this role. Next was IT management, security and quality assurance, software development, system engineering, and IT operations and help desk.
In recent appointments and career moves:
Airline company KLM has promoted Eelco van Asch as new EVP Information Services & CIO. He succeeds Paul Elich, who will be retiring and Maarten Stienen will succeed Asch as Senior Vice President Hub Operations. Since 2000, Eelco has held various commercial, operational and management positions at KLM, Air France KLM and Cargo. He has served as Senior Vice President Hub Operations since 2016.
The ODP Corporation, parent company of OfficeMax, Office Depot, CompuCom and Grand&Toy, has appointed Terry Leeper as executive vice president and CTO. He will report to CEO Gerry Smith and serve as a member of the executive committee. Before ODP, Leeper held executive roles at Amazon and Microsoft. Most recently, he worked as head of product and tech of Amazon Business, prior to which he was director of software development for Amazon’s Retail Systems Platforms. Before Amazon, Leeper was with Microsoft for 12 years, where he held the positions of director platform strategy while living in the U.K., and director of developer division while living in China.
Database platform company MongoDB has appointed Mark Porter as CTO. Porter joins MongoDB from Grab, Southeast Asia's super app that provides everyday services such as ride-hailing, food, package, grocery delivery, mobile payments and financial services to millions of people. Prior to Grab, Porter led many Amazon Web Services' database efforts including the AWS Relational Database Service, Amazon Aurora and RDS for PostgreSQL, the AWS Database Migration Service and the AWS Schema Conversion Tool.
YMCA of the USA has appointed Siva Balu as Vice President and CIO. In his new role, Balu will be responsible for rethinking and reorganizing the work of Y-USA's information technology strategy to meet the evolving needs of Y-USA and YMCAs throughout the country. Balu joins the organization from Blue Cross Blue Shield Association, most recently as Executive Director & Head of Enterprise IT.
And…
Anthem has appointed Anil Bhatt as CTO.
General Electric has appointed Colin Parris as Senior Vice President and CTO.
Blackstone has appointed Rob Wisniewski as CTO.
Nokia has appointed Paul Unbehagen as NE Americas CTO.
Vistra Corp has appointed Tom Farrah as Senior Vice President and CIO.
Twillo has appointed Michelle Grover as CIO.
Lexington Medical Center has appointed Anna Shalkham as CIO.
Ethos Vet Health has appointed Greg Swope as CIO.
Access Today has appointed Matthew Hillery as CTO.
A.O. Smith has appointed Melissa Scheppele as CIO.
Allegheny Health Network has appointed John Lee as Chief Medical Information Officer.
