Silicon Valley’s Alternative Strategy for Attracting Technical Talent
As any recruiter will tell you, every start up in the valley want the best engineers to join their team. They want engineers from top schools who have experience working for the most renown companies and who are known in the developer community to be experts in their craft. However, the demand for technical talent is currently so fierce that these individuals are often prohibitively expensive or simply not available (not to say it’s impossible to recruit these individuals, but it is by-and-large the exception to the rule). In an effort to combat this shortage of technical talent, some companies, including IGN.com, are taking an alternative approach. For a growing number of companies, no longer is the high academic pedigree and deep professional experience the major metric by which candidates are selected. There are currently a few company-backed programs that will teach those less-accredited and engineering minded in an effort to raise them to a level at which the company would hire them as entry level coders. The notion here is not to take on less talented individuals, but to find equally as talented coders through unconventional means.
Take a look at this article by Fast Company’s E.B. Boyd for a more in-depth look at this current trend. Is high academic achievement and professional experience the best metric to judge potential talent? Or, is it time to widen our idea of what constitutes a viable a candidate?
