Author: Ilya Talman

When Amazon chose the markets of New York and northern Virginia for its HQ2 company headquarters, a number of cities on the short list asked the same question: “Why not us?”

Based on the chatter around town, Chicago was no different in asking this, especially since it appeared at one point that the city might actually get HQ2 with multiple visits from Amazon representatives.

I’ve heard plenty of reasons for these selections, such as an easy commute back and forth to Seattle by air (call me skeptical since LaGuardia’s airport is one of the worst airports to get in and out of).

Instead, let’s look at a fundamental issue at the heart of any decision this monumental for a company: The availability of certain talent, specifically technology talent as well as advertising and marketing talent. Now, we know that there is a good level of both tech and marketing talent in markets like our own. However, Amazon isn’t just seeking software developers or DevOps people. They likely want the top 5-10% of that talent pool, of which the numbers get small very, very fast.

As such, if Amazon were to look at Detroit, it’s doubtful that Detroit has that many software developers. They might have looked at Pittsburgh, but Pittsburgh is a small town. So it made sense for them to look at areas where there would be a larger quantity of this high caliber talent.

The successful city recipient of HQ2 needed to not only have the highest quality talent but also be able to attract talent from outside of that area. In fact, Amazon grew in Seattle not so much because there was an enormous level of tech talent already present in Seattle. It was because they were able to bring the talent to Seattle. 

So availability of talent and ease of attracting/relocating talent to the area surely was high on the list of factors to consider for Amazon.

Third, Amazon needs to be able to compete for talent in the area effectively. For example, Amazon probably couldn’t go into Silicon Valley because while the region obviously has a lot of talent, the competition for that talent is going to be fierce – which means devoting a lot of dollars for prime talent.

In northern Virginia, Amazon should be able to compete more effectively, attracting highly capable people at a more cost-effective rate. In addition, Amazon will probably pursue government business in the region, so connecting with people in Washington, D.C. and the surrounding area makes sense.

Talman Advantage #7:We Already Know Many People At The Top 

The built-in advantage of being a more specialized recruiter for over three decades is that Roy Talman & Associates established many strong relationships with senior leaders in the C-suite and Director level. How do we truly leverage that? Prior to your interview, we can provide you terrific insight on the person’s background, the questions they’re likely to ask you and even a few clues into why prior candidates were likely rejected.

A recruiter that equips you with more information in advance of the interview? That just might make all the difference – if you talk to Talman first.

So…why not Chicago?

After all, couldn’t Chicago meet much of the above criteria?

In terms of Chicago, let’s take a look at the availability of talent in terms of 50,000 people. How easy has it been for Facebook and Google to recruit people here in Chicago? Not as easy as you might expect.

Yes, those companies are hiring but we are not seeing software developers, at least over the last year, going to either Google or Facebook. That’s because the talent that these companies are competing for have ultimately gone to financial trading companies – and that makes the competition very tough.

It’s challenging to compete with financial trading companies because they’re smaller, very technology intensive and they pay very well. So this may have been a significant consideration for Amazon – if Google and Facebook have been having such difficulty attracting specific tech talent, how would Amazon fare?

See, there is not enough of an appreciation of how fierce the competition is for a certain kind of technology talent. It’s not just a matter of dollars and cents. Some people are not going to move just because of an opening. Consequently, if you’re going to hire 10,000 or more of a particular high caliber of individual, you can’t do it very quickly. And if you’re fishing in a barrel, you’re not going to get a ton of fish out of one barrel. It just doesn’t happen. You need to have a big ocean to fish from. Even then, it could take several years to build up a significant group of technological talent.

With this in mind, Amazon splitting its HQ2 company headquarters makes perfect sense. It’s simple arithmetic that they don’t have to find and fit in 50,000 technology people in one location. They can aim for 25,000 people in one location instead. So if Amazon is striving to attract the top 10% of tech talent in the area and there are 250,000 people in that talent pool in the area, it’s a bit more manageable.

Of course, they probably won’t get the whole of the top 10% talent and may attract a portion of it. But, in practical terms, they can still have pieces of their business that function more or less in different locations. And by the way, when we talk about different locations, it’s not just New York and Washington, D.C. for Amazon. They have very substantial presence in a lot of other cities, including Chicago, Boston and Silicon Valley. So they’re not actually putting all of their eggs into three baskets. They’ve got many, many baskets.

The Ability To Handle Amazon’s Footprint And Impact

Let’s face it: No matter how big the list of contenders for HQ2 seemed to be, you could count on one hand the number of cities that could legitimately handle Amazon on so many levels, from its real estate footprint to impact on other businesses.

If Amazon were coming into a smaller metro area such as Indianapolis, for example, it would potentially create dramatic shortages for other companies and suck a lot of oxygen out of the area.

If there was any city I might’ve seen as an alternative to these awarded locations for Amazon, it was Boston. While not the largest city, Boston is very tech heavy, has substantial research capabilities and offers talent that can grow in that particular area. If Amazon wanted somebody to concentrate on machine learning, for example, they’d look no further than MIT. But again, few cities could handle Amazon quite like New York and the Washington, D.C. area, where the impact won’t be as severe. New York can comfortably accommodate millions of people in its metro area and a variety of industry hubs, from finance to advertising.

Plus, both of these areas have significant infrastructure for building and for hiring talent as there’s a much larger pool of individuals they need to pursue.

Naturally, there’s another important factor that people don’t mention all that much, but let’s not pretend that it doesn’t matter – we know Jeff Bezos has an affinity for Washington, D.C. as an owner of the Washington Post. So with a house there and a background in finance (people forget that this is where Bezos got his start), New York and the D.C. area make sense as two places that are quite comfortable for him to live. So that “in-house” advantage of these markets was probably very tough to beat too.

We will surely learn even more reasons in the days to come as to why Amazon passed over Chicago, but the city has nothing to be ashamed of in being one of the runner-up locations for HQ2. With a continuing steady stream of tech companies coming to the city and expanding their existing space such as Salesforce adding 1,000 new jobs over the next five years at a new 57-story office tower, Chicago is still very much in the conversation as a growing tech hub.

From New York to Chicago, Roy Talman & Associates is as excited as ever to call upon its 30+ years of experience to bring top tech talent into these ever-thriving markets. If your plans call for significant growth and an influx of talent, the timing couldn’t be better to talk to Talman first. 

Someone recently came into my office with a background in database management for the financial industry over many years. He asked, “I’m not seeing a lot of needs that entail the use of Oracle products…why is that?”

My answer, basically, was that a heavy background in Oracle didn’t matter because Oracle is essentially yesterday’s news. Of course, COBOL is also yesterday’s news too yet we can still see large banks and brokerage houses running major systems that were designed in the 1980s.

Why is that?

There are a couple of realities: The fact that something is considered yesterday’s news doesn’t mean that there’s no business there at all or that there aren’t people using it. Secondly, technology in general is often very challenging to replace as long it keeps working and until you can recognize a significant number of areas in which it is lacking. In other words, you can’t appreciate all the things technology can’t do if you never asked it to do that in the first place.

For example, let’s say a system is not friendly with a particular smartphone or designed to have 100,000 users accessing it. In many of these situations, the way to address this problem has often been to throw hardware on top of a system to handle a customer request. When a company analyzes how much it might cost to migrate to the new technology, unless it needs to accomplish things that their current technology cannot do, it’s a matter of sticking with “works good enough.”

Will such a company ever “get it” and evolve? Or will someone put them out of business before they do?

We don’t have to look beyond our own backyard in Chicago to see an example of the latter: Sears. This once iconic brand – whose creditors appear ready to shut down the company – has been built on systems that have rapidly become outdated. Consider the systems within a company like Amazon, whose underlining processes entail being able to offer a full inventory online competitively and deliver that inventory on time. This business model was simply not part of the reality that Sears lived in for most of its existence. As a result, the company couldn’t keep pace with the customer’s growing desire to order virtually everything and anything in a company’s inventory on demand.

Talman Advantage #5: A Real Partner With A Plan

When a recruiter talks to you on the phone for 20 minutes just once, there’s only so much they know about you beyond the resume. On the other hand, Roy Talman & Associates will work with you to gain a robust understanding of your skill set, goals, work style preferences and more. Then, rather than “blasting” your resume out to the hiring universe with random results, we’ll make a plan with you on what order we will present you to various firms that we feel are a best fit.  

Your career deserves more than a quick chat. Partner with a recruiter who can help you feel more in control of the process – as you should be. Talk to Talman first.

Now, you might wonder why, as hard as it would’ve been to change systems, that a more forward-thinking leader would’ve recognized the investment needed for survival.

Well, it depends on the leader in many cases.

In my view, if you’re going to lead a tech company, it might not be enough to come from, say, a background exclusively in finance. You may also very well require a technological element in your education at some point in your life to get the full picture of what technology can do for you today and what technology might be able to do for you tomorrow.

The case in point for this may be Microsoft. Bill Gates, clearly a computer guy, was very in touch with what Microsoft could and could not do well. Microsoft obviously did quite well under his watch. Then the company elevated Steve Ballmer, who is a phenomenal marketing and sales professional but couldn’t fully understand certain things about what the technology in his environment could or couldn’t do. He kept making bets that were technologically undoable and hurting the company. When he was replaced by more of a “computer guy,” Satya Nadella, Nadella not only abandoned things that were technologically unfeasible but then he started to figure out how we would have more Microsoft products running on lots of Android devices.

Jeff Bezos of Amazon has a background in computer science, so he “grew up” on technology and can see where many things are going and not going from a tech perspective. No, it doesn’t mean he’s perfect (i.e. Amazon Fire), but he’s certainly got more hits than misses.

So the type of technology that a company has now will quite often tell us when the design originated, as most systems will take five to seven years to become truly widespread within the organization. Is their system using Hadoop, for example? Then you know the system was designed in the last five years. On the other hand, is it using Oracle? Then the system was designed more than 20 years ago – and that’s perfectly fine as long as everyone in that industry is also using Oracle. But if someone else comes along and understands how to deploy a totally different type of technology to their advantage, then that company that didn’t budge on overhauling their systems can very quickly become the next version of Sears.

Keep this in mind as you evaluate the next potential stop in your career. Get a feel for how often real change has taken place from a technological sense and the approach that its leaders embody. Is it an Amazon? Or a Sears?

Fortunately, you don’t have to discover the answer to the above on your own – with over three decades of experience, Roy Talman & Associates can provide you with real insights on whether a company is on the cusp of technological change or generally maintaining the status quo. We also understand the trends shaping industries even before they officially arrive, which can open you up to possibilities for your career you may have never previously considered. Talk To Talman First.

A few months ago, Facebook signed a new lease in the Loop comprising a whopping 263,000 square feet – a space that many speculate can hold 2,000 employees or more. Around the same time, we learned that Google was planning on adding 100,000 square feet of office space. Pinterest leased 30,000 square feet in the West Loop. Salesforce is in talks to lease 500,000 square feet and add 5,000 jobs.

Which company from the west coast is going to be next to expand in Chicago in a big way?

Perhaps the one with the biggest implications for investment and hiring of them all: News broke recently that search committee members for Amazon’s HQ2 paid a second trip to Chicago, creating a buzz that the city is very much in the running for a second headquarters location that may bring as many as 50,000 jobs over a decade’s time. For the moment, Amazon has already selected Chicago on a smaller scale by leasing space in the Willis Tower and Ogilvie Transportation Center, representing the first Amazon Go cashier-less convenience stores outside of Seattle.

One thing is for certain – companies such as these don’t make investments in real estate of this magnitude merely to “test the waters” and see if an expansion is going to be a success. Yes, Chicago still has more to prove to Silicon Valley companies in the way of providing a fertile ground for strong candidates to recruit. However, if such candidates can rise to the occasion and complete essential projects, then ever more complex projects from these companies may arrive in Chicago as opposed to the west coast. At that point, we will see a monumental development in terms of where tech companies devote their resources.

 

How might this impact the strategies of hiring managers in Chicago?

It won’t happen necessarily overnight. Many tech companies are not aiming to hire thousands upon thousands of candidates in short order as Facebook might. Rather, they may be more focused on hiring the top 1% of the top 1%.

That said, with the potential surge of companies from Silicon Valley coming to Chicago to strengthen their outposts, the level of competitiveness for these top candidates may increase significantly. Companies that once thought they could afford to wait for the very best of the best candidate to surface may feel at least some greater urgency to move faster toward attracting top talent.

At Roy Talman & Associates, we’ve always found it to be smart to dial up the intelligence on where the best talent on the market is located and establish long-term relationships with them. It’s also good to have our “antennae” up and stay abreast of the type of skill sets that companies will demand in the near future. In a new era in which Silicon Valley companies muscle into the local landscape to compete for talent, companies may not need to be “always on” when it comes to hiring, but their recruitment intelligence certainly should be always on.

To use an analogy, imagine if the CIA – our nation’s intelligence agency – decided to take a day off and get around to listening to chatter at a later date. That would be completely irresponsible and dangerous, right? It’s the agency’s mission to know what is going on at all times so they can take proactive measures instead of being purely reactive, when it might be too late to act altogether.

 

Talman Advantage #4: Better Positioning For Your Best Opportunity

 

The reality is that, in so many situations, that “perfect job opportunity” may not be formally listed by a company. In that instance, where some may simply fire your resume off to an HR person’s email and hope for the best, Roy Talman & Associates takes a more creative and purposeful approach.

 

 

ABR: Always Be Recruiting

 

Similarly, several Chicago-based companies may be more compelled than ever before to continually be in search mode, even if they are not in hiring mode, in order to know where top candidates can be found when the opportunity presents itself.

That opportunity may come in the form of your own company growth but it may also come from a high-impact individual leaving the company, creating the need for you to move quicker toward a hire that hopefully possesses many of the former employee’s specialized set of skills. Let’s face it – even before companies from Silicon Valley landed in Chicago to buy up office space, we were already seeing employee tenures at companies continue to shrink. Where it was once unheard of that an employee would only be at a company for two or three years, it is rapidly becoming the norm in the technology space. Now add a range of well-known tech companies from Silicon Valley to the mix, which may aim to entice the talent within your company to at least explore the possibility of working in one of those environments.

Simply put, hiring managers have to err on the side of thinking that the high quality talent they hire today will not stay at the company forever, especially in this ever-more competitive climate we are witnessing. If you make that assumption and do not wait until the day when someone leaves the company in order to start recruiting, you will have hopefully already hit the ground running with your outreach to new candidates.

What we’re looking at is a bit of a shift in strategy for companies and it’s an important one: A more constant, steady stream of communication with candidates across a spectrum of many different departments and skills. This does not mean that your company is going to make a hire, but it does mean that you can send a clear message that through your consistent recruitment efforts, you want to know the best of the best talent at all times.

As a key partner in that initiative, Roy Talman & Associates frequently talks with top performers in the technology arena to understand what they value today and what goals they may have for tomorrow. In turn, they also approach us for insights on the industries, company cultures and technologies they may want to familiarize themselves with. Whether yours is a company from the west coast joining those expanding to Chicago or one that has been established in the city for decades, count on the 30+ years of experience and resources from Roy Talman. We can help you move forward on a solid recruitment strategy and keep your company very much in the running for the best quality talent, even if companies expanding from Silicon Valley increase the level of competition for that talent to its highest levels too.

 

In our last post, we talked about how some people are drawn to the idea of making it big in an expensive area like New York or San Francisco while working for one of the top companies in the tech space. We often refer to this idea as “winning the lottery.” Many see themselves winning “the lottery” on the basis of the company that hires them, the role they step into and the salary they command.

However, it can also be argued that winning the lottery has other definitions as well. In fact, winning can be had in the form of working on your own terms.

For example, we were speaking with a highly educated technologist who shared with us a story of his first day on the job at Goldman Sachs over 10 years ago. On day one, he looked his boss straight in the eye and said, “I will not work more than 12 hours a day.”

That’s not a statement most people would make on their first day or perhaps any day! Nonetheless, that’s exactly what he was able to do. Now, that’s not to say those boundaries weren’t tested. On several occasions, if his day was to be done at 6:30pm, at 6:15pm his boss would stroll up to his desk, start talking about what needed to be done and, of course, how it needed to be done right away.

However, the technologist wasn’t going to bend. Once again, just as he had on his first day, he looked his boss in the eye and said, “Remember what I said about how long I work. Therefore, I will jump on this right away the first thing tomorrow morning.” And then he would promptly leave the office. Meanwhile, several other people stayed longer, fuming that they were putting in 14-hour days and burning out not long after.

Since that time, this individual has gone on to work for Google, where he finds that Google’s main priority is your level of production. He only has to attend one meeting per day. This is important to him because with a wife and two kids in the suburbs, he is passionate about maintaining a proper quality of life – not having his work interfere with his lifestyle. He doesn’t have to live in the heart of Manhattan either. He’s perfectly comfortable living in New Jersey and commuting to Manhattan.

Calling your own shots at work so you can have what you want in life – that certainly qualifies as winning “the lottery,” doesn’t it?

Some may view this example as unrealistic, but is it really? If you have a powerful set of skills as this particular technologist possesses, you may have a degree of some leverage in asking for certain things of an employer within reason, i.e. working no more than 12 hours a day compared to 14 hours a day or having a hard stop at 6:30pm. Let’s face it – he wasn’t asking to work for only four hours per day or leave every day at 2:00pm. He simply wanted to ensure that the quality of his time at home would not suffer due to continuous overwork.

Yes, being in the right environment with values that matched his own also played a part too. Candidates working with Roy Talman & Associates don’t experience this feeling by accident or luck. We carefully understand what both sides of the table, employer and potential employee, want in one another. Our deep insights on a company’s culture, its managers and the career path possibilities within the walls of the business can help us steer candidates toward more of the ideal fit in every way.

When that perfect match is found, the feeling is very much like winning “the lottery” for all parties involved – a win for the person starting a new chapter in their career and a win for the hiring manager who brings in that rare talent who may impact the company in phenomenal ways for years to come.