CIOs Say There's Work Piling Up and They're Ready to Hire

Published: January 11, 2010

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Robert Half Technology, an IT compensation and headhunting consultancy, says that chief information officers are seeing IT work pile up and they are gearing up to do some hiring this year.

RHT did a survey of 1,400 CIOs in December at companies located in the United States with 100 employees or more, and 10 percent of them said they were very understaffed and another 33 percent said they were somewhat understaffed. Some 53 percent said they had the right number of IT employees, and only 3 percent said they had too many people.

"Many companies have cut technology staff levels too deeply, making it challenging for IT departments to keep pace with demands," explained Dave Willmer, executive director at RHT in a statement accompanying the results of the survey, which are detailed in the Robert Half Technology IT Hiring Index and Skills Report. "Although businesses may be able to operate with stretched teams in the short term, being perpetually understaffed isn't sustainable and can detract from the overall productivity and morale of the organization."

CIOs responding to the survey seemed eager to get on with things, with 7 percent saying they will be adding IT staff in the first quarter of 2010, and 4 percent saying they will make cuts; 89 percent of those polled said they would stand pat in the first quarter. That said, 42 percent of the CIOs told RHT that they were confident that their companies would invest in new IT projects in the first quarter. You can drill down into some of the charts that RHT supplies as a teaser to sell its report here; scroll down to the links at the bottom of that page, which have some interesting bits of information.

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