The Explosive Growth of Tech in Baltimore
The fast growth tech scene in Baltimore is nothing short of incredible.
Led by diverse companies in diverse industries like biotech, IT & cybersecurity, advanced manufactured, aerospace & defense, energy, and apparel.
The one Baltimore tech-pride moment that has stayed with me through the years was from Kevin Plank, CEO of Under Armour.
In a Business Insider article from 2015 Kevin described how Under Armour was a tech company, not an apparel company.
“If we believe that our future is going to be defined by these hard pieces of glass or plastic that sit in our back pockets, you’re crazy. It is going to convert into apparel.”
Every time I think about the future of tech in Baltimore, I think about this article from Kevin Plank.
The growth of Baltimore tech is outpacing the growth of the Baltimore labor market.
This is creating a competitive landscape for those software engineers, and the software engineering recruitment agencies in Baltimore have become a crucial pillar of the Baltimore software engineering community.
What is a Software Engineering Recruitment Agency
Software engineering recruitment agencies help companies identify, recruit, and land tech talent.
The agency reaches out and recruits software engineers to fill specific positions, and then sends them to their customer to begin working through the recruitment process.
The right agency helps companies to land hard to get talent. That is why a good recruitment partner contributes to the growth of a company.
The Types of Companies Competing for Software Engineers in Baltimore
The tech scene is fun to watch in Baltimore – from world class apparel brands, defense contractors, and healthcare to small startups moving through the incubators across the city – the Baltimore tech scene is diverse and growing quickly.
This is great for the city, but for individual companies it means the labor market is tight, and software engineers have their choice of employer.
It’s not just about their compensation, software engineers in Baltimore have chooses from brands they love to missions they care about.
Here’s a small example of the types of companies that are growing in Baltimore and competing for tech talent.
Under Armor: While Under Armour is most well known for apparel, the company considers themselves a tech company (and they are putting their investments behind that vision). At the time of writing, Under Armour has almost 700 jobs available.
Homesnap: Homesnap is a company that has created a new way of building a bridge between consumers and real estate agents through a state of the art mobile application or an online search engine. It also allows consumers to browse housing and their prices. According to the 2019 Inc. 5000 list, Homesnap was named the 38th fastest growing private company, this being the second year Homesnap has been on Inc.’s list. Only one in four private companies achieve this.
Trinity Technology Partners Inc.: A rising IT company that was founded in 2008 in Washington DC. They set out to provide resources and solutions for a variety of companies with personalized IT properties such as cyber security and cloud management.
Johns Hopkins Software Engineering Program: The prestigious Johns Hopkins University offers a degree in computer science (called the Johns Hopkins Engineering for Professionals Computer Science Program), which leads to a strong foundation for becoming a software engineer. It puts students to the test with their knowledge of computer algorithms and their abilities on how to work and analyze them.
Incubators and Accelerators in Baltimore
Alongside these established, fast growth companies in Baltimore, the city is flush with innovative entrepreneurs with great missions that pull in mission driven engineers that want to be part of an entrepreneurial culture.
Incubators and Accelerators are facilitating much of the local start up growth. These organizations that set out to help other companies just starting up to become successful.
Each have similarities and differences, such as accelerators providing more resources and incubators giving startups a physical location to begin their work.
They are an essential factor in the growth of technology and jobs for software engineers.
Here are a few examples of IT incubators and accelerators in the Baltimore area:
Impact HUB Baltimore: This organization aims to create a better community for Baltimore by creating opportunities for anyone on a mission to do the same. They assist with areas such as education, economy, health and wellness, city planning, and housing.
Open Works: This organization has set out with a mission to make the resources they create available to anyone who needs to use them, hoping to maintain Baltimore as the industrial and innovative power it has always been.
Emerging Technology Centers (ETC): ETC has been around for nearly two decades, founded in the 1990s. They strive to offer affordable workplaces and tools for those hoping to begin their business, as well as both incubator and accelerator programs and several connections and opportunities.
FastForward: An organization that has supplies nearly a thousand hours of mentorship and supports more than one hundred startups, FastForward also aims to create a pool of resources to be taken advantage of when moving new technologies to market.
Baltimore’s Hyper Competitive Software Engineering Market
This is just a small window into the tech companies in Baltimore.
The growth and diversity of the tech industry in this city has created a hyper competitive software engineering market, which has made software engineering recruitment agencies incredibly important for companies looking for talent.
Just like tech companies, software engineering recruitment agencies in Baltimore come in all shapes and sizes. While these recruiting firms are incredibly helpful to companies, the connotation around recruitment and recruiters is quite negative.
If you ever wondered what software engineers think about in technical recruitment, Parsed surveyed software engineers about recruiters and the companies that use them.
Register for the on demand webinar How To Challenge Your Technical Recruitment Partner to Deliver Good Candidates.
The One Thing That is Wrong with Recruitment Agencies in Baltimore
The negative connotations with software recruitment agencies isn’t unfounded. Every engineer has a horror story.
Some of the stories from engineers include being harassed daily by recruiters from these agencies.
The mentality is to send companies as many resumes as possible because it increases the likelihood that one of them is a good fit.
They care about the quantity of resumes, not the quality.
This quantity over quality mentality means recruiters screen resumes by keyword.
Recruiters don’t have a technical background, so they don’t understand the nuances of different languages and different roles. The only way they know how to screen a resume is by keyword match, and that’s a recipe for disaster.
One of my favorite recruiter fails is when they recruit me for a java role, when my resume only mentions javascript (if you’re non technical, these are as different as fire and ice.)
When the recruiters that contract with you have this mentality, they waste your time and money.
You are forced to sift through the wrong resumes and interviewed the wrong people. Better processes and recruiting is necessary to rectify this issue.
How Technical Recruiting Should Be Done
Parsed started as a technical development shop, so we understand how overwhelming it can be to have to hire an in-house engineer.
Not only is the competition fierce, but the technical requirements are daunting, and you want someone who is the right fit for your growing team.
We recognized this challenge in the marketplace first hand, and built a recruiting department to solve the problem of recruiting for other companies.
Parsed has a unique approach to recruiting built by engineers for engineers. The Parsed 3-Step Vetting Process screens every candidate 3 times before introducing them to one of our customers.
We have a soft skills screen, coding challenge, and an interview with a senior engineer.
We believe in quality over quantity, and including one of our senior engineers in the vetting process for candidates allows us to ensure that our customers only spend time with candidates that can do the job.
This is achieved through the three steps mentioned: a soft skills screen, a coding challenge, and then a more in depth interview with a senior engineer.
Once the candidate has passed all three steps of this process, they become Parsed Approved, meaning they are capable of the jobs that they are applied to.
The Parsed 3 Step Vetting Process saves our customers time and money. Our customers spend more time with great candidates, so they hire better quality engineers faster.
This saves you crucial time and money that can be spent on the actual project at hand instead of filler resumes and interviews that lead to no where.
Do you need help finding the right person for your project?
Contact us, email us at hi @ parsed.io, or start a live chat in the bottom right of this page. We’ll schedule an introduction call to learn more about what you’re hiring for and to see if we can help.
If we’re a good fit for you, we’ll help you hire the right software developer. And you’ll get to spend more time building great software, and a great business.
About Us
At Parsed, we know you want to be free to focus on growing your business.
In order to do that, you need a custom-built software solution that will help you accomplish your goals.
The problem is, you don’t have the resources or capacity to build it yourself, which leaves you feeling stuck and stressed out about the future.
We believe as a business leader, you should be able to build software that helps you accomplish your goals without having to make sure your app is built to spec, on time, and on budget.
We’ll build your web or mobile app for you—to your exact specs, on time, and on budget—or we’ll help you build it yourself by hiring the right U.S.-based developer.
Get ready to delight your customers and crush your competition.
Schedule your intro call today, and in the meantime, register for a free webinar, How to Challenge Your Technical Recruitment Partner To Deliver Good Candidates so you can stop worrying about not getting what you pay for from other custom software development companies and instead receive a high-quality, built-for-you or built-by-you app that works across platforms and will help you achieve your goals.