Tech Companies Duke it Out for Technical Talent

April 8, 2011 - PRLog -- Silicon Valley, California. Have you heard the buzz? Silicon Valley is experiencing the most vicious war for talent in over ten years.  Not just engineers, but talented start-up executives and lower level employees, are currently experiencing a deluge of offers from big name companies like Facebook and Google. These successful, established companies are hiring huge numbers of employees with technical talent as fast as possible.  Silicon Valley giants are also offering an increasing array of outlandish (fabulous) perks, including free haircuts and ipads, sweeping views of SF Bay, and stock options to attract and keep precious technical talent. They are also offering historically high salaries and benefits, enabling them to easily be a first choice for fresh-out-of-school talent and to more easily poach employees from smaller companies and start-ups.

Gosh, kinda makes you wish you were an engineer right now, doesn’t it? What a stark contrast to the experience of a majority of job seekers facing a devastating mismatch when it comes to skills and actual jobs available.

The established Silicon Valley giants are not the only threat to those trying to reduce employee attrition or hire new technical talent. With the economic upswing it is once again relatively easy to get funding for a good idea, so many engineers, managers, and potential CTO’s are dropping out of the job market. With personal and venture capital investing on the rise, start-ups are popping up like daisies in all of the tech hubs of the U.S., not just Silicon Valley.  They are immediately entering a fierce competition for the best technical talent, whether they like it or not. Small fists against titans like Google. With the tech atmosphere the way it is today, many agree that talent retention and hiring the right employees are now every tech company’s most important risk factors.

It is because of the entrepreneurial spirit, alive in many talented engineers, that some companies are embracing different forms of entrepreneurship training as a sort of backwards means of talent retention.  At Square, co-founder Jack Dorsey (co-founder of Twitter) offers entrepreneurship education sessions to employees. Redfin, an online real-estate company in Seattle, offers entrepreneurship classes and even sets up meetings between venture capitalists on it’s own board and their hired talent! Redfin says that this has actually assisted them in attracting talent and reducing employee attrition. However, many do leave to start their own companies and become potential competition, so is this the right tactic?

For companies in the tech space, this war for talent is very real. I think it is time to consider innovative ways to inspire employee loyalty (besides training them to become your competitor!). Benefits and perks are important, however, research shows that this is not enough.  What do you think tech companies can do to win this war? Please visit my corresponding blog entry at http://upmo.com/blog/?p=324 and share your thoughts.

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Employees Rule. UpMo provides the industry’s first employee-centric enterprise career management solution to emerging and large corporations. By helping people plan, pursue and manage their careers in a way that benefits both them and their companies, UpMo SaaS solutions helps companies embrace employee mobility to dramatically increase productivity, reduce employee churn, and improve employee engagement. www.upmo.com