Tech Employees on the Move

By: Scott Olson

Talent Management provider D​eepTalent​ has just released a new report showing to which companies employees of the biggest tech companies are going to.

Tech workers love to move around, as found in our p​revious research that demonstrated the middle residency length of workers at tech companies was only 23 months. This portability has substantially less to do with pay since every one of these organizations provide a high salary. The more likely reason has to do with the fact that individuals appreciate a new challenge and this is especially true of younger workers who are constantly enticed with new opportunities. The impact of having your brightest run out the door after two years can destabilize and cost in revenues that now won’t emerge.

Our research looked at thousands of job history profiles on Linkedin to determine where employees who have left one of these titans of tech ran to next. Our examination found that to many organizations their biggest rival is employees who return to higher education. In some cases this was because of an exceptional number of interns such as Facebook (nearly 25%) but also included those who went to become teachers or get into research. ​Apple, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft employees were more likely to go back to education than to any other specific company.

Another intriguing find was the rotating door amongst Google and Facebook where a fairly close amount of workers essentially hop from one to the next.

Competition for truly bright talent is higher than ever with the perks and security of a large tech company or the excitement of a small startup ready to snatch up able workers. Another intriguing find was the rotating door amongst Google and Facebook where a fairly close amount of workers essentially hop from one to the next. Amazon and Microsoft’s exchange is also no surprise given they are some of the biggest tech companies in the state of Washington.

Getting young vibrant workers in their 20s and 30s to stay put is testing enough. The median tenure length for people in the age range of the average tech employee is only 3 years. Add to that a chance for something new and it makes it that much harder. HR chiefs must continue the be on the lookout for workers who feel they have hit a ceiling, or simply have a supervisor that isn’t the right fit for them. Gallup has ​proven ​on numerous occasions that having a great manager is vital: having support, realizing what is anticipated from the manager, getting gratefulness and helping you open up inner strengths are all extremely important components to creating an environment that discourages turnover.

By Scott Olson