In the current economic climate, hiring new people is something that's put on the back burner at many organizations -- especially if there's any threat that a "reduction in headcount" might be in the cards. But, that doesn't mean no one is hiring IT people. In fact, certain talent is still hard to find and highly sought after at some organizations.BlueWolf, an IT resources and consulting company, says a recent online survey of 132 CIOs at varying sized companies across several industries the United States, indicated that 60% expect to maintain hiring plans for 2008, despite the sour economy. Also, nearly 21% say they expect to step up hiring while only 19% anticipate a decrease.

Those survey figures are a bit more optimistic than findings of an InformationWeek Research poll also conducted in July, in which 72% of the 612 responding business-tech professionals named "new hires" as an investment likely to get scaled back at their organizations in response to the economy.

Meanwhile, back in early July, my colleague Chris Murphy reported in a news story that Bureau of Labor Statistics data for the second quarter indicated IT hiring was up 2% from the first quarter, despite doldrums in other segments of the U.S. job market.

Bottom line, apparently some places are still hiring techies, whether it's "only" at around 30% of companies or up to 60% of organizations, or somewhere in between or outside those ranges.

And who are these hiring companies looking for? Tech job recruiters and staffing firms report that there's still big demand for project managers, business analysts, architects, and other key talent sets.

BlueWolf cofounder and principal Michael Kirven says his company is getting client requests for skills related to project management, database administration, and especially open source stack LAMP technologies, including Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP.

"Those are hot and hard to find," he says.

What skills are hot at your IT organization? Finding it hard to attract certain talent? Or maybe your organization isn't even looking to add any new people right now. Let us know.