Rapleaf’s Auren Hoffman says that hiring is harder in a downturn because the noise goes up but the quality stays the same. That’s a pretty strong statement to make, but if it’s true then it’s all the more remarkable to see which companies are making hires now.

Our site ReadWriteHire covers new hires in tech and new media. Today we’re publishing our aggregate numbers for the first 3 months of 2009. Who’s hiring? Software and IT companies, social media and social networking companies and marketing and advertising firms.
Leading Sectors
We’ve reported on a total of 420 hires since the first of January. The top 10 sector categories have been:
These numbers are quite similar to the trends we identified in the final months of 2008. The “other” category includes sectors like research and testing, VOIP and tech consulting companies.

- Software/IT (24%)
- Social Media/Social Networking (15%)
- Marketing/Advertising (11%)
- Publishing/New Media (7%)
- Hardware (6%)
- Mobile (4%)
- Gaming/Entertainment (3%)
- Search (3%)
- Government (2%)
- Security (2%)
News of those positions getting filled came from press releases and personal tips, but also from mentions of new jobs on Twitter and blog posts. We scour the web daily for cool news about people getting cool new jobs.
There are far more hires going on in total than we can currently report on, but we’re working on expanding our capacity and we believe that this is a valuable data point as a semi-representative snapshot at least. We hope that the particular hires reported on ReadWriteHire will also be of interest to companies in each of these sectors. Knowing who your competitors have hired is valuable information.
If you’ve made a new hire or gotten a new job recently, drop us a line to let us know! You can reach us by email at [email protected].
Congratulations to everyone who secured these increasingly difficult positions to land. Join us over at ReadWriteHire for more stories of exciting new hires every day of the week.