Recruiting. Staffing. Consulting.

Still waiting for the market to come back? Wondering if your tech skills are just as marketable now as they were when there were more jobs in the trenches than there were bodies to fill them?

Craig Stone, chief executive of HireNetworks, was getting a lot of such questions. It prompted him to rally his staff to conduct a survey of exactly what information technology employers are looking for these days. The result was the first Hot IT Skills survey.

During the first three months of the year, Raleigh-based HireNetworks put together the survey and sent it out to other recruiting firms that work locally to see what Triangle headhunters are on the prowl for. They didn't send it to the recruiting shops of local businesses --"although that would have been easier because they aren't competitors," Stone says -- because they wanted to get feedback from recruiters with a broad view of the market.

"What we found was that the bad market hasn't made people change a lot," Stone says. While the overall employment market remains tough, companies are still looking for high-tech talent.

In general, the hottest recruitment area in the Triangle is software development, with Java, Visual Basic, C++ and object-oriented programming leading the pack. Database development (with Oracle skills on top) and Internet development (bring on the XML talent) rounded out the top categories.

Stone says that HireNetworks, which went out on its own as a recruiting firm catering to young tech firms last year, is Exhibit A when it comes to evidence that companies are still hiring. "We're making money every month; you can't ask for more than that."

If Stone and his team had wanted to do their survey online, they could have turned to webslingerZ of Chapel Hill. Late last month webslingerZ, a Web-shop survivor of the dot-com debacle, announced the launch of smartASK, Internet software to help create, deploy and monitor online surveys.

With prices that range from several hundred to several thousand dollars, depending on the size of the software license, smartASK is poised to be a big chunk of webslingerZ's sales.

"We've had some very big names in market research coming to our site to look at it," says CEO Jeffrey Hoffman.

SmartASK (Hoffman pleads the Fifth Amendment on the origin of the name) is the first of what the folks at webslingerZ hope will be a number of packaged product offerings as the Web matures and it becomes more obvious which tools customers will pay for.

In another moment of irony for the anti-Microsoft camp, The Wall Street Journal and other news outlets this week told the story about a Web site set up to convince corporate IT guys to dump their Unix operating system and embrace Microsoft's Windows instead. Problem is the campaign site, called "We Have The Way Out," and put up by Unisys and Microsoft, was running on the open-source Unix variant operating system called FreeBSD. Oops.

It was free publicity for the open source folks, such as Raleigh-based Red Hat, who are busy chatting up the same IT guys to convince them to dump Unix in favor of freely available variations like Linux. In fact, 90 percent of Red Hat's staff is now devoted to that single thrust of the market. The only grumbles stemmed from the fact that it was FreeBSD, not Red Hat Linux, that showed up on the Microsoft/Unisys site.

Any April showers falling in the form of money from sales or from venture capital pockets? Send tips and news to cdyrness@newsobserver.com or call 829-4649.