With the unrelenting demand in the quest for more technical talent, it’s common shop talk in talent circles to reference the merry-go-round of talent between the large tech players.
Article by Ezra Hodge
The banter goes something like this: “(Company X) keeps poaching all of our best people.” “Don’t hire from (Company Y), they will ruin your team dynamics. Hire from (Company Z).” “I found the perfect person at (Company X), but her comp is too high.” “We just have to build new talent, this is crazy.”
In the current climate, employees leverage the demand benefits of scarcity. Employers with the most money to spend, poach well-vetted and often unhappy employees from a competitor, promising better perks and trappings, to support their high growth efforts.
And so it goes, round and round…
Depending on who you ask, it’s likely this merry-go-round will drive up salaries for another 5-10 years — until the cloud transformation efforts level out and early career talent is groomed and ready in much larger numbers. Then, everything is supposed to reach a perfect equilibrium. Maybe it will, but it sure didn’t happen with software developers. And, we don’t see the indicators for it with cloud talent either.
- In March, CompTIA reported that 245,000 new tech jobs will be created in 2021, with a mean wage twice the national U.S. average for U.S. employees.
- In April, CIOdive found that job postings for cloud-related roles increased 42% over the prior three years.
- In August, there were 5.6 million jobs posted on LinkedIn, of which approximately 350,000 sought cloud-related talent.
- In September, Gartner released a survey that found that IT leaders “see the talent shortage as the most significant adoption barrier to 64% of emerging technologies, compared with just 4% in 2020.”
So for now, the talent merry-go-round will continue spinning for big tech – and the small, mid-size and large industrial companies will have a hard time attracting and keeping their best talent – unless they have a strategy, which is a topic for another day.
Let’s look deeper at the tech talent merry-go-round.
Facebook — the Biggest Talent Pirate of All?
This was surprising to me. Facebook apparently has the highest percentage of cross-company poaching than any of the other big tech companies in this list. An estimated 35.6% of Facebook’s current employee base was poached from other large tech companies. Interestingly, they like to raid Microsoft talent, with an estimated 11.6% of the total current Facebook technical workforce coming from Microsoft. This was followed by 9.1% from Google. If you bundle AWS and Amazon together, 8.1% of Facebook’s employees are former Amazonians.
Why is this? Are people harder to poach from some companies because they are happier where they are? Are some places/people avoided because of their workplace reputation and attitudes? Are salaries and compensation major factors? The motivational reasons for the moves are beyond the scope of this article, but fodder for a future analysis.
Who poaches the least? Oracle appears to hire the fewest people from the big tech companies. Is that because people don’t want to work at Oracle? Or is it maybe because Oracle wants a workplace team fabric that isn’t shaped by other big tech “cultures”? Regardless, with 148,000 Oracle employees matching the search criteria, only 3.5% came from the other big tech companies.
Microsoft and Apple were nearly tied for second lowest, with Apple at 6.9% and Microsoft at 8.4%.
The following table shows the total number of estimated technical employees each company has hired from the others listed, and the percent of their total current tech workforce:
If you’re working at one of these big tech companies and considering a move, you have a much better chance, it would seem, of getting into Facebook, Amazon/AWS, Google and Netflix than Apple, Oracle, or Microsoft. But don’t rely on that if you’re thinking about switching. If you really like Apple, Oracle or Microsoft, and you have experience at one of the other big tech players, they might be very interested in talking with you to increase their own talent attraction from those sources. All this having been said, if you are looking, be sure to gather good intel on where you intend to land, so you don’t jump from the frying pan into the fire. This is a two-way responsibility between employer and prospective employee, but it’s always where recruiters can and should add value, and frankly, why I co-founded the McKinley Hodge Group. Great employees deserve to be in rewarding roles, doing work with purpose.
So let’s get back to the numbers.
Here are the hiring trends broken down by company. You can see some interesting things, such as, Apple hires the fewest people from AWS compared to the others. Google poaches heavily from Microsoft. SalesForce attracts a lot of talent from Oracle. (Click here or on image, below, for full size PDF.)
If you’re wondering about the estimated total number of technical employees at each, here is that table.
After doing this analysis, the following hit me as the big takeaways:
- Big tech really is a merry-go-round of talent, but the talent seems to get pulled into the inner sanctums of some companies more than others.
- Because of this, the large, mid-size and smaller technical companies really struggle to hire this talent.
- Everyone (employees and employers) needs to think about the environment and workplace to find and keep the best match.
- The data underscore the underlying belief of the McKinley Hodge Group – there is a need to redeploy top tech talent off the merry-go-round and into the broader industry. This helps everyone, frankly, to sustain growth and drive adoption of key technologies to benefit actual customers.
- The importance of “culture” and fit of employee and employer traits can’t be overstated – and will be the topic of one of the next MHG columns.
NOTES: The data is based on public LinkedIn data search results, which may not be comprehensive. My goal was to identify the relative flow of talent. If any of the named companies wish to provide more data to the post, feel free to reach out.
To define “technical talent,” I took a broad brush. I looked for people with any of these words in their profiles: technology, tech, software, hardware or cloud. This might have included some people who aren’t truly in the tech space; however, they still represent employees currently employed by and/or moving between these large tech companies.
It’s important to realize that these data are a snapshot. They don’t represent velocity of current hiring or trends.
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Ezra Hodge is a co-founder of the McKinley Hodge Group (MHG), an executive and technical search firm specializing in cloud talent. After working in multiple executive leadership roles and scaling global cloud programs for Amazon Web Services (AWS), he came to understand that the greatest challenge for modern businesses to scale is finding the right people with cloud experience and/or early career aptitude. Seeing this as the biggest hurdle of business today — and the greatest opportunity for the new workforce of tomorrow — he co-founded MHG. Feel free to comment below, or drop him a line at https://mckinleyhodgegroup.com/contact_us/.
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