Fred O'Connor

US technology professionals searching for jobs may want to look in states not normally considered Information Technology hot spots.

The three states with the highest percentage of IT job growth for the first half of 2014 were Texas at 5.99 percent, Florida at 5.64 percent and North Carolina at 3.8 percent, according to a report from IT job site Dice.

Free snacks and on-site video games may help companies attract skilled IT workers, but speeding up the hiring cycle is also important. Drawn-out employee searches frustrate IT managers and prompt good candidates to accept jobs elsewhere.

Increased corporate IT investment and the technology industry's low unemployment rate have created a candidate-driven market, so companies need to streamline the recruitment process if they want to get their hands on the best IT pros available.

"The unemployment for technical jobs in most of our markets is a lower rate than the general unemployment rate," said Victor Gaines, vice president of talent acquisition at Fiserv, which provides financial services technology to banks, retailers and investment firms, among other clients. "Folks who have technical skill sets are finding jobs at a faster rate and they're staying at those jobs [longer] than perhaps some other skill sets."

Jack Cullen, president of IT staffing firm Modis, offered a blunt assessment of the US IT hiring process: "Managers that are hiring IT talent, they're pickier than ever and they're hurting themselves." Talented workers may have multiple job offers, he added, so slow and overly selective employers will lose their top choices. IT job website Dice.com placed the US technology industry's unemployment rate at 2.7 percent in 2014's first quarter, compared to an overall US unemployment rate of 6.7 percent.