Monday, March 5, 2012

Unfilled jobs push high-tech hiring engine to max

From the San Francisco Chronicle

"Rarely a day goes by without news of a new tech company opening up in the Bay Area, or an established one expanding its footprint in the city and increasing its staff.

"Salesforce.com said last week that its hiring needs are such that it can't wait for its planned Mission Bay campus to be built to accommodate them. On Thursday, Macys.com said it had signed on for an additional 240,000 square feet of office space to "accommodate our needs as we move to the next level of growth," according to Macys.com President Kent Anderson.

"Good news for the economy, of course, but a growing headache for those tasked with finding the right people for the jobs.

""Unfilled vacancies on our books have tripled in the last 12 months." said Jeff Lucchesi, executive vice president at Taos, a high-tech recruiting and consulting firm headquartered in San Jose. "The hiring engine has been pushed to the max."

"The shortfall is being felt from San Francisco to the East Bay to Silicon Valley.

""One of the biggest challenges CEOs tell me they face is the competition for a qualified, highly skilled workforce," said Carl Guardino, president of the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, a public policy organization with 365 corporate members. "While the unemployment rate hovers around double-digits here, for college graduates with an (electrical engineering) degree here, I'm told, the rate here is closer to 1 percent."

"The gap points to what Lucchesi calls a "major skills mismatch problem," which in some cases is delaying product rollouts and in others hindering internal organization. That he traces in part to the dot-com bust, in which thousands lost their jobs and a tech career became not so attractive to pursue.

"At the same time, with the advent of cloud computing, mobile apps and other advances not imagined in the late 1990s, new sets of skills are required. "Now the IT market has regenerated, and we're saying where are all the people? We're beating the bushes real hard," Lucchesi said.

"So is VMware, a $43 billion tech infrastructure company in Palo Alto.

""We talk to top candidates who already have offers or opportunities at startups. That's where we've seen a drain of talent," said Anu Datta, VMware's senior director of strategic staffing. The company is finding the people it needs - VMware employs more than 11,000 people, including 3,500 in the Bay Area, in 40 offices worldwide - "but it's taking a bit longer to get them," he said.
Citing a "dearth of computer science talent," Datta said the company is looking to see what it can do, through its own foundation, "to stimulate more interest in science at high schools, even down to middle school."

""The talent pool is not as rich as we'd want it to be. It's not growing fast enough," said Aaron Levie, CEO of Box, an enterprise cloud-based collaboration and storage company that is moving into a new 97,000-square-foot site in Los Altos on Monday.
The new space, triple the size of its Palo Alto location, is to accommodate the 7-year-old company's staff, which has grown from 125 to 400 employees since the beginning of last year, a number expected to double this year.

""Skills are definitely an issue," Levie said, "but it's also about what your company has to offer that you couldn't get, say, at an Oracle or Google. For us, it's about producing a more energetic and dynamic work environment, offering jobs that double in scope and challenge in the space of a year."

"Other methods pursued by companies in this cutthroat recruiting environment include poaching, which accounts for many of the 90 former Google employees now working at Twitter in what Bloomberg Businessweek described as a "hiring binge" by then-chief operating officer (now CEO) Dick Costolo in 2009.

""Poaching is happening big time," said Lucchesi, whose firm recruits for more than 100 high-tech companies in the Bay Area. "It's the 'When you're starving steal someone else's food' situation."

"In January, a federal judge in San Jose gave the green light to a private antitrust lawsuit filed against GoogleAppleAdobe SystemsPixarIntuit and Lucasfilm for allegedly secretly agreeing not to recruit each other's employees. The companies settled a similar complaint with the Justice Department in 2010.

"Then there's salary inflation.

""We've seen salaries jump 20 percent in last four months," Lucchesi said. "We've seen Linux engineers offered salaries from $115,000 to $145,000, and they're getting multiple offers. Everybody is competing for the same people."

""Everyone is switching jobs and demanding more money," said an executive of a San Francisco mobile applications company who did not wish to be named. "Companies are trying to move as quickly as possible, so they're hiring as fast as possible."
One drawing card is San Francisco where high-tech companies across the board are opening up and expanding - because that's where the talent is, I was told time and time again.

""It's a key differentiator to help us attract talent," said an executive with Salesforce.com, which has 3,000 employees in San Francisco out of a worldwide workforce of 7,700, and "expects to hire more aggressively."

"VMWare is taking the long view.

""We're focusing less on recruiting right away and more on building a relationship with candidates we really want, even if they start off going elsewhere," said Datta. "If they think in 12 months or so they want to go somewhere else, hopefully we'll be top of mind. We have to look 12 to 24 months down the road to keep the talent pipeline flowing."

"And there is one other option. If all else fails, there are the centers VMWare has in China and India."

SF Chronicle

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