HOW THE GLOBAL RECESSION WILL IMPACT TECH HIRING

As the ramifications of the COVID-19 pandemic are felt across the globe, experts are raising fears about an oncoming recession and significant drop in hiring. While February 2020 was an average month when it came to job growth, what happened next shocked everyone. Within just a month, the US recorded its highest unemployment collection. 

In the event of another economic recession, it could lead to mass layoffs. Due to the recession and severe slowdown in the global economy, it is clear that tech companies and IT service providers may expect sales to dwindle in the coming quarters. 

Nevertheless, a recession generally demands that companies cut unnecessary spending from their running budgets, and this often includes tech and web development. In doing so, they seek to keep a healthy web existence with a smaller staff. While some will struggle during this downturn, some industries in tech are actually booming. FAANG is hiring at a steady pace. In this article, we take a look at how the oncoming recession will impact tech hiring.

When the recession occurred in 2008, it impacted some businesses more than others. And curiously enough, the tech industry did not face a severe backlash as expected. Now, the question is whether the same is going to happen this time around as well.

Tech firms are better placed than most businesses to deal with jobs in such situations because of the implicit acceptance of remote work, especially in software. The capacity of tech employees to finish their projects remotely, coupled with a rush in search of multiple web services, gives software-centred firms an advantage over others in different sectors, like travel, food and others. 

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Candor, a US-based HR consulting firm reported on tech hiring recently and wrote, “Tech is likely to take a hit, but overall continue to remain one of the most productive parts of the economy and be relatively better off.

Remote Jobs Will See A Rise

The general mobility of software-focused jobs provides the tech sector with a massive benefit during an economic slowdown. The tech sector is more adapted to this shift to remote work than a lot of other businesses.

Elizabeth Morgan, an HR manager at Google wrote, “I can say that Google is still hiring. Many companies are. Many companies have moved their onsite process all the way through onboarding into remote technologies.”

At the same time, with a dramatic rise in interest for remote work – which profoundly relies on IT support and skills – IT experts could see themselves massively overwhelmed by work as more businesses shift to remote work. This means that within technology, we may see demand in IT and system administrators.  

Software Engineers And Developers In Demand

More importantly, software engineers are expected to remain in high demand. To illustrate, software jobs are still in substantial demand in India. According to LinkedIn, software engineer (10,132) and developer (24,173) are two of the biggest job positions among all the open vacancies in India as on 30 March 2020. Out of these numbers, 4316 job vacancies for software engineers, and 8694 job vacancies for developers were posted in India in the last 30 days, as per LinkedIn. 

IT Jobs May Remain Strong 

According to research from Candor,  IT infrastructure (along with software) is one of the leading tech sectors where companies are still hiring strongly. 

For example, full-stack developers and software engineers are in demand. Furthermore, people who can manage front- and back-end processes; those who are eloquent in popular programming languages like JavaScript, Python, C# and others are expected to be in demand. 

Among the recession-proof skills, software development, networking and systems administration, database administration, software quality testing and QA, are a few substantial areas where companies will continue to recruit.