Growing confidence by CFOs and other corporate leaders in the strengthening economy is expected to lead to increases in IT spending this year. However, the forecast for IT job creation isn't quite as sunny.

According to the Duke University/CFO Magazine Global Business Outlook Survey of 848 CFOs across the world, finance chiefs plan to spend 9 percent more on capital expenditures over the next 12 months and nearly 5 percent more on technology. Overall, CFOs are anticipating a 2 percent rise in full-time domestic hiring for the coming year, representing the highest increase since 2006. The increase would represent 3 million jobs, which would lead the U.S. unemployment rate to drop below 9 percent, according to John Graham, a finance professor at Duke's Fuqua School of Business and director of the survey who was cited in a CFO Magazine article about the study.

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.