As the job market for IT and other professionals is expected to strengthen in 2011, I thought I'd take a moment to examine what is arguably the biggest variable in the employment puzzle: the hiring process.

Critics argue that the hiring process is broken. Corporate hiring processes are typically too slow, layered with red tape and often designed to fill a square peg into a round hole. This is painfully evident in IT hiring circles.

With Bush-era tax cuts about to expire at year-end, the Obama Administration and other legislators have recommended a series of pro-business tax measures that are aimed at bolstering the economy and the jobs market.

The measures being explored could potentially help to unshackle the national unemployment rate, which has been stuck at around 9.6 percent for several months. The moves might also help breathe fresh life into the U.S. IT jobs market by stimulating broader investment in hardware, software and other technologies.

As budgetary constraints often play a major part in IT resourcing decisions, the advantages of IT outsourcing become more attractive for business. However what many organisations fail to realise is that wholesale IT outsourcing can have far reaching implications, not just in HR scenarios, but also the sudden and immediate loss of business knowledge and the company system idiosyncrasies that are all too often taken for granted; which once gone, take time to rebuild and re-learn.

Last week I posted a question in the "CIO Conversations" forum on this site. The question was:

There's an interesting article in Silicon.com which draws from a CIO "jury" of a dozen CIOs and IT leaders. The article explores whether mega-IT projects like multi-year customer relationship management (CRM) or enterprise resource management (ERP) deployments have gone the way of the dodo bird or still have a chance of being approved and deployed within cost-conscious and time-sensitive business environments.

The "jury" has ruled that there is still a place for mega-IT projects - by an 8-4 margin -- so long as the efforts are well-managed and deliver repeatable benefits along the way.

This is purely a personal hunch, but I have to guess a lot of IT professionals aren't entirely comfortable touting their successes. People in the IT function probably market themselves the least of professionals in all functions.