There’s a serious talent shortage right now for strong analytical and technical people. It’s a shortage for startups and established companies alike. Startups, inventing the future, are a much better place for the talent but it’s difficult to convince people that there’s a better, more exciting opportunity when things are good enough. People are generally averse to change.
Startups, as a community, need a more concerted effort to extract talent from large companies. Here are a few ideas to start extracting more talent:
- Work harder to target and invite developers to meetups around certain technologies or programming languages — one of the best ways to convince someone to change jobs is to talk to them in person about some common bond
- Additional content marketing around tech talks, best places to work, and more so that people will be exposed to other corporate cultures that get them excited
- Better articulation of the value of startups having more autonomy, mastery, and purpose
- More highlighting that large companies aren’t as safe as people believe, with the recent Google office closing and Yahoo layoffs as prime examples
Extracting more talent from large companies to work in startups will be hard. Very hard. For startup communities to thrive, especially in markets that are still aren’t mature, extracting more talent from large companies is one of the best things they can do.
What else? What are some other ways to extract talent from large companies to work in startups?
David Cummings on Startups 