Atlanta Startup Community - Retaining Talent

01/14/13 22:52:00    

By Michael Mealling

At a weekly breakfast meeting last week the subject of measuring the impact of Startup Gauntlet came up which lead to a broader discussion of how and how not to measure what the Atlanta startup business community is doing.

While we didn't come to any glaring conclusions over our hashbrowns, Frank Moyer did do some analysis on talent retention and recruiting. Here are some of his major conclusions:

• 74% of graduates from these Top Engineering Programs currently work in one of the Top Technology Startup Cities plus Atlanta.
• San Francisco retains 65% (6,281) of the Stanford and Berkeley engineering startup graduates. Atlanta is second at 52% (1,122), followed by Austin at 45% (1,673), then Boston and Los Angeles. The other cities do not have one of the Top Engineering schools within 50 miles.
• On recruiting talent from other cities, San Francisco scores highest with 3,260 coming from one of the Top Engineering Schools other than Stanford and Berkeley (which are within their 50 mile radius). Atlanta scores last in attracting external startup talent of the 11 cities with 280.

Let me repeat that last sentence again: Atlanta scores last in attracting external startup talent of the 11 cities with 280.

Pipefish felt this reality personally when our key Rails developer was recruited away from us to join a startup in San Francisco. But we're not the only ones suffering. If you look at the job board at Hypepotamus and you'll see companies begging for people. Rails developers and UX/UI designers are the dominant need with PHP and Java coming up a distance third and fourth. So even though we retain a fair percentage of graduates they're not developing skillsets we need (hence the reason the merger of Big Nerd Ranch and Highgroove made so much sense).

But at the end of the day it boiled down to this simple fact: when he told me where he was going the first thought that came to my mind was “If I were 23 years old I'd do it too.” I've even recommended it to graduating aerospace students. So that leaves startups that need talent in a bit of a bind:

How do we get things done when the talent is so hard to find or its in an agency that has priced itself out of our market?