These companies are luring digital professionals from all the rest.

IBM and Nike may work very well, but they are forced to wage a tedious digital cadre war that even Google doesn’t always win.

Want to know how high the level of innovation in a particular company? Look at the experts whom it attracts or, on the contrary, loses. Today, attracting and retaining leading experts in the field of high technologies is not an easy task.
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Many companies are deceiving themselves, thinking that in order to meet current standards in this area, it is enough to change the names of existing posts and introduce new ones that will include “digital technologies”. The number of professionals who call themselves “digital directors” on LinkedIn has risen from 965 people in 2015 to 3255 in 2016, that is, an increase of 237%.

Such a semantic shift masks the harsh reality. Only a small group of companies - those that have always lived at the expense of digital technologies (do not confuse them with the “born IT people”) - takes top professionals for themselves, forcing the rest to choose only the “best of the worst”.

Invisible (working) hand

Something has remained unchanged. If you believe the study of L2 ^★ , the brand solidity makes the company more attractive. If your company has a reputation as an innovator in the field of information technology, then the specialists of the relevant profile will reach out to you. The changes affected the employers, who were traditionally considered respectable: they began to have difficulties.

Take Nike as an example. This company regularly appears in the lists of the best employers and overtakes other leading consumer brands in popularity - L'Oreal, P & G and LVMH. But its authority fades away compared to firms initially specializing in digital technology. The number of search requests for vacancies on Amazon, Facebook or Google is an order of magnitude higher than that of Nike.



It turns out that the migration of IT professionals from organizations to digital companies is already happening. WPP, Omnicom, Publicis and Interpublic Group have lost their experts who have gone to Facebook and Google. According to L2, LinkedIn data analysis, these 2 giants hired 2,227 people who had previously worked in WPP, while WPP managed to attract only 124 former employees of Facebook and Google, that is, a net loss of more than 2,100 people.

Highly listed and workers leaving state institutions. Their professionalism is usually more valuable than the experience of specialists who migrate in the opposite direction. Most often, such organizations will be able to lure out of Facebook and Google only students or interns who have not received a permanent job offer from giants.

Sad conversations are also being conducted in the personnel departments of the largest advertising firms: "They took the best people from us, and we took their trainees."

All in family

Where do high-tech companies get their employees from? Borrow each other. But not everyone here is on an equal footing. Traditional players in this field transfer their specialists to new titans. Indeed, Microsoft is the largest source of talent for all other firms in this area. In 10 of the investigated L2 companies, initially specializing in digital technology, today there are about 13 thousand former Microsoft employees.

Not surprisingly, Yahoo is also losing its leading IT professionals, moving on to its competitors. While most digital companies borrow footage from IBM, its “younger sisters” Pinterest and Snapchat are luring away specialists from Google. IBM is your father, and Google is his younger brother. Both of them are a little lame, but Uncle Joe drives a Porsche , and his disability is not so striking.



All this puts strong, but older teams in the league of digital technology in a somewhat unusual position for them. Google, which invests heavily in human resources (in the form of compensation, as well as various bonuses such as food in the office and vocational training), is witnessing a pronounced “yo-yo” phenomenon: the return of specialists who once left him. So while Google loses many professionals, some of them come back.

Indeed, Google has more of these “repentant prodigal sons” than all the other digital technology companies combined. And this forces one to admit that the economic effect of such features of corporate culture is quite high. The remaining members of the Big Four (Facebook, Apple and Amazon) also constantly attract employees of other related companies, including younger ones. But at the same time, such players as Uber, Lyft and Airbnb are not at all difficult to entice the workers of the Big Four, having offered them a share of share that is still desired by many leading workers in the high-tech sphere.

The few companies that have achieved some success in “borrowing” specialists from the main IT-giants have some similarities.

1. Proximity to high technology centers. Walmart, who recently acquired Jet.com, provides an example, indicating its concentration on internal transformation into a universal sales channel. The opening of an office in San Bruno (California) allowed the retailer to attract more than 300 Big Four employees, 218 of whom had previously worked for its largest competitor, Amazon.

2. The allocation of specific firms. Nike hired several former HR managers from Apple and with their help formed the staff for leading stores from those who could offer the next generation sales technology. Likewise, Kimberly-Clark set its sights on Amazon and took the leading e-commerce experts from there, which in turn helped the company attract other professionals. In fact, 6% of the Kimberly-Clark team involved in this business came from Amazon. And as many as 46% of the Amazon employees they hired had at least 10 years of experience.

3. Access to management. There is another scheme that allows brands to successfully engage in recruiting, associated with the provision of excessively bloated rights and - not surprisingly - the keys to the restroom of top managers. L'Oreal, for example, managed to hire a digital director for Instagram from Instagram, giving him a place on the board.



Overall, the trends are staggering. The newest companies, initially specializing in digital technologies, take the best of the best from their older colleagues. Quarterbacks and yesterday's prom queens are left alone at parties , while the rest tend to be on a selfie with the captain of the chess team, who barely opened a SaaS company.

And although the old guard has a tactic that allows it to attract workers, until recently its impressive opportunities have somewhat dimmed. Today, it is becoming increasingly difficult for her to roll this stone uphill.

PS We recommend another useful article - Why did Dima Koroly leave Microsoft, Facebook and Google before joining a startup?

The author of the translation is Vyacheslav Davidenko, the founder of the TESTutor company.