Klaus Werle, senior editor at Manager-Magazin, took the opportunity to sit down with Gravity’s Jeff Winter and discuss recent bay area recruiting and retention trends. As the battle to court prospective talent continues, recruiters and companies are utlilzing techniques, both old and new.
Read the full story here.
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As a technical recruiting company, it’s critical to stay on top of IT staffing trends. In addition to frequently researching data published by the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, Dice Holdings’ annual salary survey , and other credible sources of labor statistics, we also like see what some of the large firms in our space are finding through surveys of their own. Recently, we obtained a copy Robert Half’s 2011 Salary Guide for IT. While Robert Half is best known in the technology recruiting arena for temporary staffing, some of their findings align with what we are seeing in the direct hire marketplace. Notably, over half of the CIOs polled by Robert Half admit that it’s challenging for their companies to find skilled IT professionals. Even more interesting is the statistic pertaining to the probable transiency of IT workers in the coming quarters. Nearly 40% of the respondents (over 1400 employed technology professionals) claim that they are inclined to look for new opportunities as the economy improves.
Get ready for some attrition.
While we may never again see the astronomical attrition rates that characterized the employment scene during the inflation of the Dot-com bubble, it is inevitable that companies will lose valuable employees as current market conditions continue to improve. There’s already evidence that large technology employers in the Valley are trying to counteract the flight of valuable tech pros. Several of the big tech players, many of which were previously dismissive of attrition, are starting to battle back by counter offering at risk employees with higher salaries, new projects and promotions. Smart companies are realizing that the demand for talent has increased in the past couple of months and that it’s less expensive to keep a high performing employee than to find a new person and to wait for them to get productive.
Startups need to be the most vigilant.
Sure, free drinks, Nerf wars, game lounges and weekly sponsored lunches are nice but professional techies won’t settle for free Odwalla, dim sum, and Wii alone (as tempting as it may sound). Moreover, the promise of a huge liquidity event is more of a pipedream than ever. Tech professionals are going to look for new opportunities in 2011 at a higher rate for the first time in 3 years. Many startup companies, especially those stuck in the ‘90’s, that think that everyone should just naturally want to work long hours on mediocre projects for low pay and average benefits are going to have to channel their entrepreneurial creativity to find ways to motivate and inspire valuable employees to join and to stay engaged. Oxygen bar? Just kidding. That’s never worked.
A couple of weeks ago, we wrote a blog post about the recovery of the technology job market, referencing positive indicators found on Indeed.com. Well, the trend continues and it’s now evident that we’ve undergone a shift from an employer’s market to a candidate’s market.
As few as 4 months ago, employers were at the helm. But the recovery has created a sharp spike in demand for tech talent and caused a noticeable shift giving job seekers the upper hand. More jobs and higher quality opportunities are great for Bay Area job seekers. People that have been out of work are finding it easier to get interviews and there are plenty of exciting opportunities for passive job seekers that are considering an upgrade.
But this is not rosy news from everyone. The increased activity spells trouble specifically for unprepared employers. Increased demand creates competition and requires employers to, among other things, streamline interview processes in order to make faster decisions. Salaries are up too. The average starting salary for a software engineer in the Bay Area has increased nearly 3% since January. Businesses need to make subtle adjustments to how they interview and must be willing to be flexible when approaching compensation conversations. Businesses that are slow to adapt will face multiple turn-downs, unfilled jobs and frustrated interviewers.
Here’s evidence of the shift from technical recruiters at GravityPeople
It’s on! Check out all of our employment opportunities here.
The good thing about recessions is that they teach us things. This time around, we learned to just call things what they are. For over a decade, we’ve been offering technology companies an alternative to contingent search. In fact, there’s a good chance that we were the first recruiting company to offer outsourced recruiting services to a technology company in Silicon Valley. Anyone remember Netfish?
Anyways, we’ve always struggled to name this service, a project-based hiring solution. We’ve called it VMR (vendor managed recruiting). We tried HLM (hiring lifecycle management). We toyed with Gravity RPO (recruitment process outsourcing). Alphabet soup!
While we’ll probably all agree that acronyms make products and services more official sounding, and that word-efficiency can shorten/simplify content at times, nothing is more important to a buyer than clarity. So with that, we’re calling our recruiting service Gravity On-Demand.
Yep, we’re tellin’ it how it is. Gravity On-Demand is a contract recruiting solution (this description was a small breakthrough for us too) that you can plug into your existing recruiting program anytime, anywhere. On an hourly basis, we offer a team of our technical recruiters supervised by our heads of services coupled with amazing applicant tracking software that shows everything we do. It’s high-touch, end-to-end technical recruiting that works and won’t break your bank.