What can your company do for you?

As an employer, how comfortable would you feel if a recruitment agency wanted to canvass your staff about what it's like to work for you?

"Sometimes they look pretty horrified at the prospect, but we tell them that, with the wealth of talent out there getting ever stronger, it's a good time for them to be honest as to their strengths and weaknesses," said Toni Cocozza, founder and managing director of IT recruitment specialist DP Connect. "I want them to tell me exactly why they're a good employer, and what I personally would get out of working there."

It's a case of paraphrasing Kennedy, perhaps: "Ask not what you can do for your company, but what your company can do for you."

Although many clients may take some convincing, it's an approach worth taking seriously. Not only because of the current skills shortage which is forcing recruiters and employers to be more creative in their recruitment tactics, but also because Cocozza thinks so.

Cocozza set up DP Connect in 1990, having worked as a sales manager for a City-based IT consultancy. Winner of this year's coveted Recruitment and Employment Confederation trophy for outstanding contributions to the recruitment industry, and with a recent shortlisting for the Veuve Cliquot Businesswoman of the Year Award under her belt, her views on IT industry trends and employment prospects carry a deal of weight.

"I've seen that you can rapidly come from a recession into a situation such as the current skills shortage," she explained. "However, it's usually only certain skills that are in short supply. At the moment, the big technology companies are clamouring after people with internet skills - Java, Perl, Active Server, and so forth. But the hi-tech industry is always changing, so there's always going to be a newly prized skill coming along."

Adapting to changing needs
All of which means that employees shouldn't regard their qualifications as being timeless and immutable. Industry's needs are constantly changing, so employees should be prepared to adapt and learn new skills. This puts them in a much stronger position, even to the extent that they can start dictating terms.

Of course, good old-fashioned qualifications such as Oracle and SQL are still in demand, particularly if you can also offer a complement of 'soft' skills.

And IT companies aren't the only option. "It's ordinary companies that have an IT department too," said Cocozza. "It used to be the case, especially in traditional firms, that IT was regarded in almost the same way as the mailroom - just another service that the business needed, and just as dispensable. Now, however, we're seeing a dramatic change, where every company knows that IT is core to its future success. So they're focusing more on attracting people with hi-tech skills."

But it's by no means a hard and fast rule, she warned, because the dotcom phenomenon has left its mark on the market. "They're offering share options, better salaries and the opportunity to be in at the beginning," she said. "Suddenly, you have clients and candidates who previously worked for large, established organisations being tempted away."

Alarm bells
This should act as a wake-up call, but many companies don't realise how important their staff are until it's too late. "The challenge for established companies today is keeping a small company soul in a large company body," explained Cocozza.

She warned that even if the package looks good, prospective employees should always think long-term and consider how their job could affect their domestic set-up.

"It's all very well accepting a top job with a massive salary in somewhere such as Edinburgh, but if you live in London and have to commute and live up there during the week, how's that going to affect your family life?" she said.

"It's all too easy to lose sight of this sort of thing in what's currently such a buoyant market. So we've often had situations where we've had the wife in and asked her to make the final decision as to whether or not her husband should take the job, because he simply couldn't," she added.

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