Bank One To Hire 800 IT WorkersBank One To Hire 800 IT Workers

For Bank One Corp. at least, the decline in IT jobs appears to be over. It's expanding plans revealed in November to add 600 workers to its IT workforce of 4,000. It now says it will hire a total of 800 workers in an effort to become less reliant on contractors and consultants.

Since November, Bank One has hired 300 workers, including some independent contractors that previously worked with the nation's sixth-largest bank, says Brian Moore, VP of executive recruiting. The remaining 500 positions are slated to be filled by July. Bank One is hiring workers with varied skills and management expertise, from straight application developers and engineers to senior-level architects. The company Wednesday didn't reveal the cost-saving it expects to achieve by adding to its IT staff and reducing its dependence on contract workers, but when it revealed its original hiring plan in November, CIO Austin Adams said: "It's about $10 to $30 per hour cheaper to have full-time employees, and it helps us to build expertise and experience."

To handle the 350,000 resumes currently populating its proprietary Skill Set candidate-tracking software system, Bank One has doubled its recruiting staff to 20 from 10 just three months ago. The resumes were gathered through postings on the company Web site, by offering financial incentives to employees for IT referrals and by posting job openings on Internet job boards such as Dice, HotJobs, and Monster.com. Moore says Bank One is using the job-board postings to learn about other candidates that could be better-suited for the job than the ones who originally applied. "We may not hire the exact person that applies, but we're using them to get to other sources, such as people that they work with or know."

Bank One's move makes sense because as the economy has faltered, top management in many companies are finding that they need people who understand risk management and financial management in IT, Gartner research director Barbara Gomolski says. She adds that Bank One's use of job boards isn't unique because many companies are using them to find out about other people and to give their business a certain level of exposure. Based on the relatively inexpensive cost of posting an ad on a job board, Gomolski says, companies believe they're getting their money's worth in terms of exposure, even if they're not doing a ton of hiring.