In my twenty years of recruiting I’ve heard many clichés about the hiring process concerning candidates’ fears, but over that time most have either been dispelled or just fallen out of favor. However, two of the oldie but goodies were repeated to me the other day and I was simply amazed at the logic of the candidate.

The classics were “You have to get it (money) coming in or you’ll never get it” and “You can’t get a promotion for two years”. Now as we all know of course there is always some truth to these or they wouldn’t have been created in the first place, but when it comes to the current IT market I can tell you that they really only exist in the poorest of shops, and here’s why.

On the money front the market is tightening for high caliber candidates, and salaries are rising ( see our blog on the topic) and therefore even if you remain in a company for multiple years the likelihood is that your salary isn’t falling significantly below the market…unless of course your skills are. As for the promotional opportunities within an organization it is true that some companies have HR policies dictating the length of service prior to a promotion, but most now don’t. In addition to that we’re now seeing that companies who either let middle managers go during the downturn or just declined to hire them at the time are now in a crunch situation with very few mid level managers within their ranks that are promotable to Sr. Management (Dir, VP & CIO) positions. So we are seeing many companies looking for high caliber candidates to enter in Sr. Technical Lead or first line management roles and have fast track career options laid out in front of them to include multiple promotions in a 3-5 year timetable.

So while it’s clear that bad clichés never truly die these two certainly have no merit in the IT market today.