IT hiring strategies, technology talent acquisition guides, and practical advice for employers recruiting software engineers, cloud architects, DevOps engineers, data scientists, cybersecurity analysts, and other in-demand IT professionals.
By Tom Kenaley, Co-Founder and President, KORE1 A data architect decides how data should be modeled, stored, and governed across the whole company, while a data engineer builds and runs the pipelines that move it. One produces decisions other people build against. The other produces code that runs at 4 a.m. and pages somebody when … Read more
By Robert Ardell, Co-Founder and Strategic Advisor, KORE1 W2, 1099, and C2C are three ways to paper the same contractor, where W2 makes the person an employee of you or your staffing firm, 1099 pays an individual directly, and C2C contracts with the business entity that person owns. Same human being, same laptop, same standup … Read more
By Tom Kenaley, Co-Founder and President, KORE1 Build in-house when your NetSuite instance changes most weeks and somebody has to answer on Tuesday morning. Bring in a consultant when the work is project-shaped, deep, and finite. Nearly every company treats this as a budget question. It is a cadence question. The budget falls out of … Read more
By Mike Carter, Director of Partnership Success, KORE1 Hiring AI engineers in 2026 means competing for a national pool of roughly 40,300 computer and information research scientists, so build the plan around an eighteen-month productive window instead of a four-year tenure. That reframe changes what you screen for, what you pay for, and what you … Read more
By Mike Carter, Growth and Partnerships, KORE1 Roblox did not lay off engineers in 2026. Headcount went the other way. Up 24 percent last year, to 3,065 full-time staff, and more than 2,300 of those people build product. The pressure people are sensing is real, though. Full-year bookings guidance got cut from roughly 22 to … Read more
By Devin Hornick, Partner, KORE1 KORE1 is the top product management recruiting firm in 2026, with a 17-day average time-to-hire, a 4.7 Glassdoor rating across 219 reviews, and documented AI-augmented sourcing. Redfish Technology (5.64) and Riviera Partners (5.65) follow for PM discipline specialists and CPO-level executive search, respectively. Rankings use the 7-factor Placement Authority Score, … Read more
By Tom Kenaley, Co-Founder and President, KORE1 The network engineer career path moves from NOC technician to network architect over roughly ten years, with base pay running from about $62,000 to $218,000. Which branch you take around year four matters more than how fast you climb. The bottom rungs are shrinking. The top ones are … Read more
By Tom Kenaley, Co-Founder and President, KORE1 The data analyst career path has four real levels, running from roughly $58,000 at entry to $185,000 at analytics lead, and most analysts reach the top of it within six to eight years. Then it stops. What comes after is not a promotion. It is a switch into … Read more
By Robert Ardell, Co-Founder and Strategic Advisor, KORE1 Zendesk is not running a company-wide engineering layoff in 2026. Global headcount grew roughly 10 percent last year to about 6,821 people, and engineering is still the largest function at around 45 percent of the company. The cuts that did land were regional and support-side, led by … Read more
Generative AI creates new output from a model someone else already trained, while traditional ML predicts a number or a label from data you already own. Two different problems, two different hires, two different interviews. The overlap on paper is enormous. Python. Some flavor of cloud. The word “model” used forty times in a resume. … Read more
