Is anyone hiring right now? Several of my clients are starting to recruit including Right Hand Technologies (RHT). Please go to http://www.righthandtech.com/ for more details on this unique engineering consulting company.
Within the last 90 days, RHT added 3 experienced hardware design engineers, each with more than 7 years experience. Furthermore, they plan to add one or two more according to senior engineer George Dotts. “These additions represent a 25% increase in our hardware engineering staff. Two of the positions are due to new contracts from existing clients. The other is for a new client. As a premier design consultancy in focused engineering markets, we require experienced engineers with at least 5 years experience. Therefore, you cannot extrapolate these hiring numbers to less experienced engineers,” says Mr. Dotts.
RHT has projected continued strong growth for 2010. Assuming those projections are met, they will be considering more junior hardware and software engineers in 2011 with the goals of: 1) freeing up the more experienced engineers from routine engineering tasks and 2) building a pool of internal talent that can be mentored and cultivated to become the future senior engineers.
Outside of RHT, I have seen mixed results. The December Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) figures showed that temporary hiring increased by 47,000. This demonstrates that companies are expanding, but are still hesitant to add full time employees. Indications of new job creation are mixed. For example, Telecom continues to be soft, IT seems to be gaining momentum and embedded software and hardware engineering has some positive results.
