“The cloud” You’ve no doubt heard of it. Most likely use it every day. You might use Dropbox to work from home or listen to music on Spotify or Pandora.
But if you are a recruiter who works in the IT space at all, you should know more if you’re going to speak intelligently to candidates who probably talk machine learning or internet of things in their sleep.
Here are some important things to know:
What is the Cloud?
It’s basically a shared virtual network that exists on the internet. Your data is stored among many (many) servers providing virtually unlimited space and instant access from anywhere. One cloud application you may be familiar with is Evernote. Clip an article to Evernote on your desktop and read it on your smart phone.
What are SaaS, IaaS, DaaS, PaaS and XaaS?
These are respectively Software, Data, Platform and Anything as a Service. What they all boil down to is outsourcing any or all the above to the cloud rather that housing the actual hardware and software on your premises.
What’s the big deal?
It used to be that when it was time to upgrade software, someone in your tech department would shuffle from PC to PC, upgrading each computer one by one. Later development allowed businesses to just update their company’s servers and push the upgrade to the desktop via the network. But now, even that has become unnecessary.
Now it’s possible to contract with a third-party vendor who can house your software, data or infrastructure for you off-site.
What does this mean for you as a recruiter?
Small to medium companies may no longer have IT departments or even a single technical person. On the one hand, this means fewer jobs of this sort to fill. On the other hand, it opens a world of possibilities to place highly technical candidates with companies who provide these technologies to individual companies.
This means you may be able to place more candidates with a single employer, which can make your life a little easier. Once you’ve got an in at for example, a top SaaS provider, you may be able to place dozens of high-paid techs at once. You can work on building your relationship with that one employer rather than courting dozens of employers who may only have one technical job opening every three years.
What do you do now?
Know your stuff. If you regularly place technical candidates, make it your business to keep up with developments in the industry and understand the terminology. The goal for you isn’t to know all the answers, it’s to know how to ask the right questions. You don’t need to be a cybersecurity or data science expert, but you should know the difference between Cloud and SaaS.