How Top Employers Keep Tech Talent
Attracting and retaining a talented technical team is the single most important success factor for the long-term success of CIOs and their agendas. But it’s also their toughest and trickiest challenge, especially in today’s hot and unforgiving market for IT and engineering skills. Companies have reached out to Everest Group to help them understand the complex issues they face and are looking for our comprehensive analysis of how other companies are handling these issues.
In response, we launched our Top Employers for Tech Talent™ program to recognize companies that do an exceptional job attracting and retaining their tech talent and share their approaches so other companies can learn from their successes.
The data forming the basis of the rankings is based on aggregated numbers representing tech worker perceptions of leading companies across multiple dimensions of key factors that attract employers to the United States. We then translated these numbers into graduated levels for comparison rankings. The inclusion of companies considered to assess workers’ perceptions of technology and the final rankings were based on market share measures.
Our inaugural report presents the ranking of the best employers (among the largest companies) in each of the three sectors, as follows:
Insurance sector
- New York life
- Liberty Mutual
- Travelers
- North West Mutual
- American family insurance
- Marsh and McLennan
- Prudential
- At national scale
- Hartford
- state farm
American technology companies
- NVIDIA
- Intuitive
- ServiceNow
- netflix
- Selling power
- Adobe
- Microsoft
- Meta (Facebook)
- Apple
Financial services companies
- Alliance Bernstein
- Capital one
- Capital Group
- loyalty
- TD Bank
- black rock
- Franklin Templeton
- American bank
- KeyBank
What approach do these leading employers take to building and maintaining a talented technical team? Before looking at this, it is important to understand the difficult and complex issues involved, as issues shape the approach.
Why the challenge is so difficult
Attracting and retaining a talented technical team is simple in theory but difficult in practice. Why? Due to its elusive nature. There are many different issues to manage and many different stakeholders to align. Moreover, it is an ever-evolving and never-ending journey.
The approach must also influence and align all stakeholders. It is a diverse group with different interests and needs and includes HR, Finance, CFO, Business Units, Procurement, Consultants and Service Providers who are part of the ecosystem company and sources that are part of the continuous technology supply chain. Influencing and aligning these different factions with the IOC’s efforts to attract and retain a talented technical team is a formidable task.
Add to that the employees themselves. We currently have four cohorts in the tech workforce – Baby Boomers, Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Z (Zoomers). Managing four very different cohorts within a single workforce is another daunting task.
Attrition, Wage Inflation and Recession
Along with the problems I just listed, add the growing prospect of a recession. The market is already tough with a critical shortage of IT and engineering skills. Companies are currently facing an imbalance of supply and demand with a very overheated talent market. This is exacerbated by attrition rates (now 23-25%) and salary inflation. Salaries, of course, vary by role and geography; and the problem of wage inflation exists in the US, UK, Eastern Europe and India.
Over the past year, salary inflation for certain roles on the in-house technical teams of US companies has increased dramatically. Examples: salary inflation has increased to 18-24% for cybersecurity architects, 22-30% for senior data scientists and 6-10% for mobile developers.
Even in a recession, it’s likely that there will always be salary inflation for roles with skills that are in demand. It’s important to realize that while a recession leads to slower attrition and lower salary inflation, the fundamental challenge of attracting and retaining an exceptional technical team never goes away. The factors involved in the challenge may change over time, but the challenge remains.
Approach used by top employers
So how do the companies in our Top Employers for Tech Talent program tackle these difficult and complex issues?
They achieve their outstanding record by focusing on multiple dimensions. They pay their talent a competitive remuneration. They focus on the work environment, which goes beyond just having good facilities. They create a sense of mission in which employees can buy into the company and the missions of the team and have a sense of purpose and belonging.
These top employers also ensure a diverse and inclusive work environment where all employees know they have the opportunity to be included and grow in the company. These employers are committed to ensuring that this work environment is authentic. As a result, employees feel empowered and excited to stay and contribute to company goals.
As we looked at over 200 organizations and looked at the factors that drive high employee satisfaction, culture emerged as the #1 dimension. The quality of the management team and the career opportunities were #2 and #3. Research has proven that simply paying high salaries without investing in the right work environment and culture results in low employee satisfaction.
Ability to build and maintain the technical team
Navigating this complex and ever-changing journey is beyond the capabilities of the CIO alone. It requires decisions on many constantly changing issues over a long period of time, and it requires aligning many different stakeholders that the CIO does not directly control.
It is important to recognize that this task is a journey. The top-ranked companies in our program have been successful in their efforts, but it hasn’t been an overnight success. There are many dimensions and decisions along the way. They’ve been working on this challenge for years and will likely continue to fix the issues. They work through economic recessions and booms, times of talent shortages and surpluses, and varying degrees of funding.
The success of our program’s top-ranked employers illustrates the need for a multidimensional, multi-stakeholder approach and for making informed, data-driven decisions. They have to orchestrate many moving pieces over time.
Moreover, the CIO must fight against the tyranny of the urgent. It’s easy to lose sight of the larger challenge when overwhelmed by projects, initiatives and budgets that dominate day-to-day activities.
Still, it’s doable if the CIO builds a vision to navigate the ongoing journey with good data to support what’s happening in the company’s market and industry.
Companies that don’t take this approach to attracting and retaining an exceptional team of technology talent are hampering their ability to execute on their vision and on their obligations. Yes, they can hire talent, but will the talent stay? Does the company have a great work culture that employees want to adopt? With the increased attrition rate, will the company be able to keep a persistent team moving forward so that the company does not lose productivity and knowledge as team members move on? other projects? Will the company have effective measures in place to motivate the technical team?
Market and industry data and the approach taken by top employers will put a company in a strong position where the CIO can attract and retain a great technical team. Everything becomes easier then. CIOs who take this approach will rise to any challenge their business presents and succeed the most important success factor.: attracting and retaining a talented technical team.
