ICT freelancers increasingly reluctant to be approached by recruiters
One in four employed ICT professionals has changed jobs and/or employers in the past 12 months. This while the ICT worker is by nature a latent job seeker, in other words: they are open to a different job, but do not actively search and apply themselves. Whereas the mobility of ICT professionals has been stable in recent years, it has strongly increased in the past year and loyalty to their own manager and/or employer has decreased. These are some of the dozens of striking results from large-scale research into the current labor market for ICT professionals by Intelligence Group and HeadFirst Group.
Growth in ICT workers mainly due to self-employed workers
The current number of nearly 600,000 ICT workers in the Netherlands will continue to grow to nearly 900,000 by 2030, making up 8.5 percent of the labor force. The demand for - and scarcity of - ICT workers remains very high. In 2023, the remarkably small growth in the supply of ICT workers is mainly due to the increase in the number of self-employed professionals. This grew from 76 thousand to 84 thousand. The group of self-employed ICT professionals continues to grow and is increasingly taking control of the labor market by ensuring that they get their assignments from their own network. The moment their current assignment ends, the next assignment from the network is already waiting for them.
Remarkably, there is a growing group of self-employed professionals within the ICT sector who are never approached for assignments. Meanwhile, this percentage has increased to 27.3 percent of the whole. An increase of no less than 550 percent in 3.5 years. "Many times the self-employed ICT worker consciously chooses to become unreachable to recruiters because they are spammed so much," said Geert-Jan Waasdorp, CEO Intelligence Group. "ICT workers are often the canary in the coal mine when it comes to behavioral changes on the candidate side of the labor market. Talent inaccessibility is a broader foreseeable development in the labor market in the coming years."
Focus on external mobility
By the third quarter of 2023, 24.6 percent of employed ICT workers had changed jobs in the previous 12 months (9.6 percent within their own organization and 15 percent to a new organization). These figures increased despite the fact that ICT workers are primarily latent job seekers. Their labor market activity last quarter was 6.7 percent , which is 70 percent lower than the average across the entire Dutch labor force. "ICT workers are thus latent job seekers and increasingly unavailable to recruiters, but they are currently moving remarkably more frequently in the labor market. How do you deal with that as an employer and client?", Marion van Happen, CEO at HeadFirst Group, asks herself. "That starts with good employer branding. In addition, build a community of potentially interesting employees and freelancers, start actively telling stories, so that ICTs become convinced of your mission and vision and they get a feel for what it is like to work for your organization. Only then will you entice them to make the step to you of their own accord or at some point to be receptive to being approached by a recruiter."