Tech companies compete fiercely for job candidates
Source: Patrick May
It's a tech tale of our times, unfolding on two street corners.
On the northwest edge of Fourth and Howard streets here Thursday morning were thousands of Google (GOOG) developers and engineers at a huge tech conference, most of them highly paid, absurdly talented and seemingly happy.
On the southeast corner were nearly 50 tech employers from the Bay Area and beyond, desperately trying to fill positions with talented geeks like the ones across the street.
With a Silicon Valley tech-hiring war raging on all sides, this intersection was a battle site.
"We're all competing against each other and against the headhunters," said Doris Keller, who was staffing the Tech Career Expo table for Palo Alto-based software provider IntApp. "We've got eight positions we're trying to fill, but there's a finite number of available and qualified candidates. So that explains the disconnect here."
The shortage of qualified candidates reflects the explosive growth in social media, apps and cloud-based computing, even as most sectors of the economy continue to languish. While some Bay Area tech employers can't hire fast enough, many companies in other industries are still seeing layoffs and furloughs spawned by a stubborn recession. Ruth Kavanagh, a labor-market consultant with the state's Employment Development Department, said much of the job growth around San Jose and San Francisco the past year has been driven by tech hiring.
"In those areas, the most job ads right now are for high-tech positions," she said. "And computer software application engineer, marketing manager and Web developer are the top three."
To deal with this glaring imbalance in supply and demand, the expo's organizers set up shop within spitting distance of Google I/O 2012, with recruiters hoping to lure and possibly poach people from that target-rich environment known as Moscone West. As event spokesman Mike Sherman put it, "there's a captive audience right across the street, so we're hoping we can get them to cross Howard and have a casual conversation with our hiring mangers and recruiters."
Yet while they expect 2,500 job-seekers at the two-day show, which ends Friday, only a trickle of folks wandered over from Google on Thursday morning.
"I get a ton of LinkedIn requests from companies to send in my résumé, but I'm not that interested," said one 41-year-old Google employee who declined to check out the job fair and who also asked that his name not be used for fear of offending his employer. "I'm paid well, I've got on-site day care for my daughter and, frankly, after working at Google I can't imagine working anywhere else."
That sort of resistance makes Kevin Clarke's recruiting pitch a very hard sell. The vice president of engineering for Portland, Ore.-based Elemental Technologies, Clarke said, "To get the best of the best engineers takes a lot of effort. I have to sell people on my company. And what makes that tough is that the people we're looking to hire already have jobs and are really happy where they are."
With his video technology firm hoping to hire 15 more people to build out their 80-person staff, Clarke says laying out $1,900 for a table at the Tech Career Expo "will be worth it if I find even one person we end up hiring from this event."
As he roamed past recruiters' booths, job seeker Anurag Rastogi seemed a lot more hopeful than perhaps some of the people on the other side of the table. "I think a lot of these companies need someone like me," said Rastogi, a 31-year-old MBA graduate from Simon Graduate School of Business in New York who has a background in technology.
"I'm looking for opportunities in the tech space, so I moved to the Bay Area. I don't think the people hiring can find enough candidates with the tech skills they're looking for, which should be good news for me."
Despite a "street team" of expo folks handing out fliers to try to coax developers over to the job fair, takers were few and far between. But around noon, developer Mohammad Salehin did walk out of I/O and cross the street to poke around the expo.
"I'm just here to explore opportunities," said Salehin, who works for Standard Chartered Bank in Singapore. "I'm happy where I am, but I came over out of curiosity. Networking is always important and it's possible something here could one day lead to a job."
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