After working for Salesforce and Snap, Briana Bell decided to hunt for a new job this year. She approached the market differently than in previous years.
Bell considered her choices as Silicon Valley experienced layoffs for the first time in more than ten years and hiring freezes spread throughout the region. She came across Everlaw, a less well-known private company that offers cloud-based litigation software.
In an interview, Bell remarked, “I was looking at a few other bigger, enterprise-size organisations in the San Francisco Bay Area. The smallest company I was interviewing with was probably Everlaw.
Everlaw was not something she had never heard of. The business first contacted her in 2019, but she opted to join Salesforce as a senior analyst at the time.
Now, the surroundings are very different.
The tech sector encountered a significant setback in 2022 after more than ten years of unrestricted growth. Some of the largest businesses saw layoffs, and others implemented hiring freezes. Meta, Amazon, Twitter, Salesforce, and HP all announced sizable employment reductions in November.
Data gathered by the website Layoffs. FYI shows that over 50,000 computer workers lost their employment in November. Over 150k people have been registered for the entire year.
According to Christopher Fong, the creator of Xoogler. co, a network for former Google employees, “many are searching for smaller tech startups to join given the tech layoffs and lesser recruiting by the big-tech companies.”
The unstable workforce once offered by big tech companies is turning to start-ups and midsize companies that offer greater flexibility and, in some cases, the ability to make a greater impact.
Bell said headlines about layoffs at industry leaders played an important role in weighing his options.
When she saw the startup, she had to trust the company. This year’s crash in tech stocks and turmoil across the economy has dramatically reduced venture capital and completely frozen the IPO market.
“I tried not to think too much about tech layoffs in interviews,” Bell said. But she said, “This is going to be very important in my job decision-making process, and I need to make sure the company is in good financial standing and management is realistic.
Startup hiring managers are busy.
Just before Bell came, Rich Liu was appointed chief revenue officer of Everlaw. At TripActions, an extremely valuable firm that offers travel software, Liu previously held the same position.
For businesses looking to hire top talent, especially those like us who are developing, Liu said, “We’re truly seeing this market shift might usher in a heyday for startups obtaining top talent.” “Startups have benefited, while big-tech talent has lost out.”
Recruiters told CNBC that despite employees considering fewer offers at once than they did in previous years, the IT job market is still competitive.
Hiring has grown a little easier, according to Lauren Illovsky, talent partner at Alphabet’s CapitalG venture capital firm, for the group’s portfolio firms. She singled out Databricks, a provider of cloud data analytics, as a business with numerous unfilled positions.
They still need to manufacture and ship a product, so they need employees, said Illovsky.
The tech oligopolies were as impenetrable as ever heading into 2022. Between June and December of last year, shares of all FAANG (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google) businesses reached record highs, and their dominance in their respective industries appeared to be largely secure.
To varying degrees, they have all been roughed up this year. Facebook (now Meta) announced last month that it was cutting off 13% of its workers after losing two-thirds of its value. Amazon has cut its personnel in half and stopped hiring for its corporate workforce recently. Throughout two rounds of layoffs, Netflix has cut about 450 jobs, and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai informed staff in July that the business will be limiting hiring investments through 2023.
When startups aren’t up against one of the FAANG giants, it’s easier to obtain personnel, according to Megan Slabinski, West Coast district president for hiring agency Robert Half.
That attitude was mirrored by Barry Padgett, CEO of customer data platform Amperity.
With a 6-year-old company based in Seattle and competing in the same market as Microsoft and Amazon, Padgett added, “It’s also simpler to retain people right now because they’re not getting 17 calls a day from recruiters.”
CEO of cybersecurity startup Expel Dave Merkel announced that his 470-person business will be hiring for more than 50 positions in the upcoming months.
“Our recruiters are busy right now because we are seeing an influx of individuals from some of these kinds of companies,” Merkel said. “This time of year is typically not particularly active for our recruiters.” “They’re more engaged,” the person said, “whether they’re in a role but anxious about what might happen next year or they were caught in a layoff.”
