Finding, hiring and retaining top talent have long been top priorities among high-tech companies. If the outcome of these searches often seems like a bidding war for a newly discovered painting by Vermeer, that’s because there is so much at stake, both for the companies and the would-be employees.
To find out which companies have had the most success in hiring and retaining top technical talent over the past six months, Paysa, a company that uses artificial intelligence to help companies and individuals find the best fit, conducted a study that analyzed résumés, job postings and social activity and tracked changes from the first half of 2015 to the first half of 2016.
Competition for top engineering and technology positions is fierce, even though the total number of such jobs has risen by about 1 million between July 2015 and July 2016 to 5.9 million, according to the most recent Bureau of Labor Statistics Jobs Openings and Labor Turnover (JOLT) survey. Hires and separations came in at 5.2 million and 4.9 million, respectively, and Paysa concluded that that suggests that the skills gap overall is widening.
Chris Bolte, Paysa’s CEO, noted:
Future financial health and success depends upon how well you manage your investment portfolio today — how you look at a particular company’s buy and sell ratings before you decide where to place your bet. Similarly, making important career and job transition decisions requires reliable insight, based on performance indicators, for the greatest chance at opportunity and salary advancement. That’s why it’s so important to pay attention to the migration of top performing technical and engineering talent, arguably one of the strongest signals of a company’s health.
On the flip side, businesses must understand how talent flows — where most of their new hires are coming from — so they can better forecast and get an edge on expansion. Growing companies hire talent from larger companies, but this type of transformation doesn’t happen overnight.
What’s at stake? An earlier Paysa study compared compensation packages for software engineers at Facebook Inc. (NASDAQ: FB) and Alphabet Inc.’s (NASDAQ: GOOGL) Google. Including base salary, an annual bonus, annual equity (stock) grants and a signing bonus, an average software engineer at Facebook earns $285,000 a year, compared with a similar package from Google of $233,000. A product manager at Facebook can expect a total compensation package of $338,000, while a similar position at Google pays $258,000.
Both Facebook and Google are among a group of companies that attract top talent from other tech firms. Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN), Pure Storage Inc. (NYSE: PSTG) and Salesforce.com Inc. (NYSE: CRM), along with Airbnb, Uber, Lyft, Pinterest and Stripe, are others according to the Paysa survey.
Companies that are losing talent to these high-flyers include Twitter Inc. (NYSE: TWTR), Box Inc. (NYSE: BOX), Nimble Storage Inc. (NYSE: NMBL), Groupon Inc. (NASDAQ: GRPN) and Scentsy.
The top 10 companies among the top 100 top ranking companies that have climbed the most in the past six months in regards to recruiting and retaining top tech talent include Lyft, Snap (formerly Snapchat), LendingClub Corp. (NYSE: LC), Veritas Technologies, Expedia Inc. (NASDAQ: EXPE),Tesla Motors Inc. (NASDAQ: TSLA), Okta Inc., Cox Automotive, Docker and Stripe.
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