Tech unemployment is 2.8 percent. So why does hiring feel stuck?

CompTIA publishes a reading of the monthly jobs data for technology work, and the October edition came out on 6 November. It is worth ten minutes, mostly because it does not match the mood.

What the numbers say

Employment in IT occupations across the whole economy rose by about 26,000 in October. The unemployment rate for those occupations fell to 2.8 percent, down from 3.3 percent the month before, while the national rate sat at 4.1 percent. Employers posted 290,892 new openings for IT roles, 4.5 percent more than in September and 22.2 percent more than in October last year. The roles with double digit growth were DevOps engineers, infrastructure architects, cybersecurity engineers and data scientists.

North of the border the picture is more mixed. Statistics Canada put national unemployment at 6.5 percent in September. Yet employment in professional, scientific and technical services, the category that holds most consulting and IT services work, rose to 2,037,400 in September from 2,026,800 in August.

Then why does it feel slow?

Because a low unemployment rate and a fast market are not the same thing. At 2.8 percent, nearly everyone who can do the job already has one. They are not refreshing job boards. They will move for the right offer, but they will take their time and they will have other conversations going.

From the hiring side that feels like a shortage. From the candidate side, especially for people coming out of the big technology companies, it feels like a freeze, because the statistic counts technology roles in banks, hospitals and manufacturers, where much of the hiring is, and those employers move at their own pace. A network engineer in an insurance company and a product manager laid off from a software firm are in different markets, even if both say they work in tech.

The pattern is familiar. A role stays open for three months, not for lack of applicants, but because the process takes five interviews and the person the team wanted accepted something else in week three.

What this means if you are hiring

Speed is now part of the offer. If you cannot get from first conversation to decision in two weeks, the people in the categories listed above will usually be gone. That is less about money than managers assume.

It also changes the case for contract staff. When a permanent search takes a quarter, a contractor who starts in ten days is not a stopgap. For a migration, an audit or a build with an end date, it is often simply the better shape of hire. Keep permanent searches for the skills you will need long after the project ends.

And be honest in the job description. A posting that asks for eight tools, two clouds and a decade of experience at a junior salary gets ignored by exactly the people it was written for.

Where X-Axis fits

We place contract and permanent technology staff in the United States and Canada, and every candidate we send has been screened by a person who has done the work. How our staffing works.