Upon reading this article I must agree that a higher percentage of Talent that passed over Start-up offers do tend to give them a second thought nowadays. Meaning: there will be a talent shift amongst large well known companies. This is a golden moment for passive talent poachers to attract top talent to smaller entities.



loomy Silicon Valley job market has some bright spots
By Scott Duke Harris

Only a few months ago, Silicon Valley executives would talk about the soaring cost of attracting and retaining talent in a rosy tech economy, grousing about the way one high-flying company plumped up the pay and perks. "The Google effect," some called it.

Now, as America lurches into a recession, valley companies — including such icons as Applied Materials, Yahoo, eBay and Sun Microsystems — have slashed payrolls. Even Google is economizing.

Yet the valley's job market isn't uniformly grim. The press for technological advantage, executives say, has kept the demand for cutting-edge engineers strong in such fields as smart-phones and so-called "cloud computing." The emerging clean-tech sector keeps ramping up on venture capital investments — a record $1 billion nationwide in the third quarter. And venture funding remains strong in the life science sector.

The lean economy itself is seen as an opportunity for companies that can deliver cost savings, such as those providing on-demand software as a service, known as SaaS.

"We're adding about 25 people this quarter, up to about 300 people," said Maynard Webb, chief executive of the LiveOps, which markets a SaaS alternative to conventional call center operations. "It's kind of a surreal environment, because we're growing nicely and investing — and the rest of the world seems to be melting."

Mountain View-based Coupons Inc., which provides online delivery of

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coupons for major brands to consumers, also is growing. While newspaper circulation has declined nationwide, Coupons Inc. this year has grown from 76 to 111 employees, and "we expect to end the year at 120," said Steve Boal, the company's founder.
Barracuda Networks is interviewing for about 20 openings. CEO Dean Drako said his business is "nervously growing. We don't know what the future holds. I don't think anyone does."

Premium talent — "black belts," as Ruckus Wireless CEO Selina Lo calls them — remains highly coveted. Data compiled by GlassDoor, a start-up that aggregates and analyzes data on companies provided voluntarily by employees, suggests that top salaries haven't diminished, but second-tier salaries are trending downward, said Robert Hohman, GlassDoor's CEO.

Hohman said he may have witnessed the Google effect this summer while interviewing a Yahoo engineer for a prominent job. He said he suspected the engineer had padded his Yahoo salary in an interview — but a check of GlassDoor's own data suggested he probably hadn't.

Hohman and several other executives said the downturn can present an opportunity to press a competitive advantage through recruitment. Some are prowling for "passive candidates" who aren't actively seeking jobs.

Synaptics, for example, is inviting groups of potential job candidates to lunch meetings at its Santa Clara headquarters. The company, which makes touch-pad interfaces for Google Android phones and many other devices, competes with Apple and Palm for engineers.

It anticipates adding about 80 positions in the coming year, about half in the valley, said Jim Harrington, the company's vice president of human resources.

"We see this as a competitive advantage — a great time to pick up top-tier talent," Harrington said. Layoffs by other companies, he said, have also created a richer pool of available second-tier talent.

Still, the overall change in the job market is stark. Companies in a position to hire are becoming more selective, drawing from a larger pool of talent.

"Last summer we'd see candidates who'd have three other offers from start-ups, plus offers from Google and Facebook," said Nick Triantos, chief executive of TokBox, a live video chat start-up that announced $10 million in venture funding in July.

Often, TokBox would lose those candidates. Now it has become a more attractive option, Triantos said.

Like other pre-revenue Web start-ups, however, TokBox's focus on product development does not create a large number of jobs — perhaps five or six in the coming months.

Despite such bright spots, job gains in the valley in coming months are certain to be dwarfed by job losses. Even the ever-percolating early-stage start-up sector is thought to be in the first phases of a shakeout that will reduce overall employment numbers.