With the worst of the economic downturn behind us, we're seeing an increasing demand for our services, so we are ready to expand again. We've had a steady growth since our inception in 1999, and have always been cautious not to grow too fast in too short a timeframe, which has helped us grow steadily over the years and remain stable even when the economy turned its back on us. This means that we often say 'no' to potential customers simply because we do not want to compromise on quality and stability by growing too fast. It also means that no matter how hard we're looking for new talent, we do not compromise on our recruitment practices and we have quite a thorough process.

In this post, I'd like to share a bit on what our recruitment process looks like, what we look for in people and what working at Ibuildings means for our staff. If you're interested to work for Ibuildings, read on. We currently have openings for medium and senior developers in our UK office, medium and senior developers and a project manager for our Dutch offices and finally several medium and senior developers in our Italian office. A complete overview with full job descriptions can be found on our website.

Last week, Cal Evans had an interesting post on this blog about an EDC study on the popularity of programming languages. In the comment section of that post, I had an interesting discussion with Bill Karwin, who suggested that when looking at the job market, PHP still seems less popular than other languages. It is not a surprise that Java and .NET have more jobs, considering they are general purpose languages while PHP's focus is on the web alone.

Later that week, I stumbled across an interesting press release by CV Screen on the job market in the UK. I'm not sure how easily this report translates to the rest of the world (comments are welcome), but since I can see similar trends in other countries, I thought I'd share it nonetheless.

Sometimes recruiting efforts yield very nice results.

As of this week, Mikko Koppanen works in our UK team. Mikko is known from his Imagick extension, a wrapper to use ImageMagick in PHP.

The nice thing about this is that now we finally have someone on board who knows how to write PHP extensions.