After graduating from Brooklyn College in May, Kamal Abdelrahman spent much of the summer contacting hiring managers. He sent off at least 50 job applications, eventually securing a data analyst fellowship with a health care marketing agency.
Abdelrahman is part of the first cohort of technology job seekers to meet a slow market in New York in more than a decade, as the pandemic prompted many companies to at least pause what was a historic rate of hiring. Job seekers are also navigating a world where in-person job fairs and interviews have shifted online.
“This is your moment, when you can go into a career you have been training yourself for. And then to see it all slipped out from under you feels a bit catastrophic,” he said.
Perseverance helped Abdelrahman land a job, he said. It’s something many recent graduates might need to summon, as junior- and associate-level positions have been the slowest to recover in the city’s technology industry.
“A lot of companies are having to shift so fast right now that they can’t afford to spend the six months it takes to train someone new,” said Jovena Whatmoor, CEO of recruiting firm Clutch Talent. “There is a lot of demand for engineers who can come in and push new products quickly.”
A slowdown in hiring for junior and associate openings could have significant implications for the city’s technology sector. People often start at a midsize startup or a big corporations such as Amazon or Google before launching their own companies. And early-career positions also offer a way for women and people of color to break into an industry where the existing workforce is two-thirds white and male.
Union Square Ventures, one of the city’s largest technology investment firms, warned this month that openings for entry-level roles had all but disappeared within its portfolio of 86 startups, many of which operate in the city. Of the 1,100 jobs listed at those companies—which include Foursquare, GoFundMe and Justworks—there are roughly 70 with a descriptor of junior or associate.
Startups are not always major hirers of entry-level talents anyway, noted Matt Cynamon, a network program manager with Union Square Ventures. Still, he said, it’s rare for early-career positions to fall as low as they have within the Union Square Ventures job board.
About 48,000 workers in the technology industry have been laid off since the start of the pandemic, according to the industry database layoffs.fyi. Mass firings could be making it harder for people to land their first job in tech.
“Companies that have historically had a hard time recruiting mid- and senior-level engineers have adopted a strategy of hiring junior engineers and training them up,” Cynamon said. “Now they are making offers to the mid- and senior-level talent they had previously had a hard time converting.”
Still, people who work in job placement say, more early-career opportunities could open from technology companies responding to the police killing of George Floyd and the national protests that followed.
“We have seen companies who are still looking at their budgets but also thinking about how to commit to the important work of creating a more inclusive workforce,” said Sheila Sarem, founder of Project Basta, which helps connect first-generation college students with technology jobs. “That has helped thaw the absolute freeze of hiring we saw starting in March and April.”
Amazon, Google, Microsoft and 24 other large corporations pledged this month to hire 100,000 low-income and Black, Latino and Asian workers in New York City during the next 10 years.
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August 28, 2020 at 06:00PM
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City technology jobs: Entry-level roles become scarce following Covid-19 - Crain's New York Business
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