Technology & IT Recruiters — Managers, Engineers and Systems Leads

Clover Search Group is an owner-led direct hire recruiting firm in Lodi, California, and technology is one of the six practice areas we run — listed as Technology & IT on our employers page. We place IT leadership, infrastructure and applications staff, security and the controls and systems seats that sit inside plants and distribution centers, for employers across Sacramento, the Central Valley and inland Bay Area operations. Brooklyn and Aidan Kearney own the firm and run the searches themselves.

IT executive search, technology headhunters, technical recruiters: different words, one service. Clover runs direct hire searches, which means the engineer or the IT manager becomes your employee rather than a contractor billed through us.

Almost nothing we place here is a product engineering seat at a software company. It is corporate and operational technology: the person who keeps ERP running for a processor, the systems lead who owns the network across four sites, the security manager a company hires the year after its insurer starts asking questions. Those roles are wider than their metro equivalents, because the team is three people instead of thirty.

The controls and automation seats deserve their own sentence, because they are the ones generalist technology recruiters miss. A processor putting in new line automation needs somebody who reads a PLC and a P&ID as fluently as a network diagram, and that person is usually sitting inside another plant rather than inside another IT department. We look for them where they actually are, which is one of the advantages of running an operations practice down the hall.

The other recurring brief is the first IT leader. A company that grew to three hundred people on a managed service provider and a capable office manager eventually needs somebody accountable in-house. That hire is about translation more than technology: the candidate has to be able to sit with an owner, explain why the ageing server room is a business risk, and be believed.

Sacramento. The deepest technology market in our footprint by a distance. State agencies and their vendors, health care systems, professional services and the integrators around them all hire here, and candidates move between those worlds in a way they cannot anywhere else in the corridor. Public-sector procurement experience is a genuine specialism and worth screening for rather than discovering later.

The Bay Area corridor. We have no office over the hill and do not pretend to. What we do have is the I-580/205 seam: Bay-headquartered companies running inland operations in Tracy, Lathrop, Manteca and Stockton that need technology staff on site here, and Bay Area technologists doing the arithmetic on what a Valley cost of living buys them. Both of those are real searches and both run in this direction.

Stockton. Distribution and logistics operations have become technology operations: warehouse management systems, automation, network reliability across buildings that cannot go dark. The seats are inside logistics and manufacturing companies rather than technology companies, which is exactly why they are hard to fill from a job board.

Those three carry most of it. See every market we cover for how the corridors connect.

If you run IT for a Valley company you are probably the only person in the building who understands half of what you do, and recruiters mostly call you about roles that have nothing to do with the one you would actually move for. We call about one specific search. No cost to candidates, ever, the conversation is confidential, and nothing goes anywhere without your say-so. More for candidates →