If you are a tech recruiter in San Francisco/Bay Area and you are thinking – “Gosh, I am getting tired of perfectly brewed Blue Bottle coffee and free snacks. Where can I move to and still recruit mind-blowingly good tech talent?”….then we have the answer for you. As a matter of fact we found several cities that have become magnets for tech talent (alas most likely none of them are as hipster as San Francisco).
To come up with that list, we looked at the LinkedIn member database of 300 million profiles and focused on cities which saw a considerable influx of tech talent in the past year. Below you can see the top and bottom 10 cities. In short: get ready to move to India and shelve your dreams of recruiting while on the beach in Miami.
To give you a sense of scale for how popular these cities are, consider this: for the 52 cities we analyzed, the median percentage of new residents with tech skills was 16%, or 1 in 6. For the Indian cities in the top 10…this number was more like 1 in 3.
The three most popular skill categories of the migrating tech talent are:
- IT Infrastructure and Systems Management (e.g. ITIL, Active Directory, Disaster Recovery, Enterprise Architecture, etc.)
- Java Development (e.g. Java, Eclipse, JSP, Spring, etc.)
- Web Programming (e.g. HTML, JavaScript, CSS, PHP, jQuery, etc.)
On the flip side, here are the 10 cities that attracted the smallest percentage of tech talent:
- Miami/Ft. Lauderdale, FL, US – 11%
- Paris, FR – 11%
- Nashville, TN, US – 11%
- Cleveland/Akron, OH, US – 12%
- Las Vegas, NV, US – 12%
- New Delhi, IN – 12%
- Madrid, ES – 13%
- St. Louis, MO, US – 13%
- Washingtond D.C. Metro, US – 13%
- Mumbai, IN – 13%
If you’d like to get the complete picture and are curious about how all the 52 cities we analyzed stack up, check out interactive map below. Just hover over the dots and you can see what percentage of new residents in this city have tech skills and what are those skills:
As you can see, the demand for techies is growing rapidly across the globe and so is the demand for tech recruiters who know how to talk to and convert this type of talent. Congrats!
Here are a few resources to check out that will make your job a bit easier:
- Java Developer supply/demand talent pool report
- What’s on the Minds of the Top Tech Recruiters at Talent42
- Interview Tactics for Vetting a Computer Programmer
- What the Hottest Startups Can Teach You About Recruiting Engineers
- Women in Software Engineering: The Sobering Stats
This research is part of the LinkedIn Economic Graph – our initiative, aiming to help every professional obtain economic opportunity. This post is based on the article “India’s Got Tech Talent: Cities in India Top List of Cities Attracting Technology Talent.”
*Methodological details: The results of this analysis represent the world as seen through the lens of LinkedIn data. As such, it is influenced by how members chose to use the site, which can vary based on professional, social, and regional culture, as well as overall site availability and accessibility. These variances were not accounted for in the analysis. Additionally, nationality and visa status are not fields included in the LinkedIn profile. Therefore, we cannot make any inferences on the citizenship of our members who were included in this analysis.
We determined the geographic movements of our members in the last year by looking at every new position that was added to profiles between November 2012 and November 2013, which included a regionally specific location (e.g. “Greater Los Angeles Area”) that differed from the regionally specific location of the previously held position (e.g. “Greater New York City Area”). Next, we excluded movements which did not exceed 100 miles (161 km), based on the direct distance between two geographic coordinates, generalized as the geographic center of each region.
We isolated cities that saw at least 10,000 new residents in the 12 month period and determined the percentage of new residents with technology skills by dividing the number of new residents with technology skills by the total number of new residents. “Technology skills” include (but are not limited to) the following categories: Algorithm Design, C/C++, Cloud and Distributed Computing, Computer Graphics and Animation, Data Engineering and Data Warehousing, Embedded Systems, Game Development, IT Infrastructure and Systems Management, Java Development, Machine Learning, Middleware and Integration Software, Mobile Development, Perl/Python/Ruby, Software Engineering Management, Software QA and User Testing, User Interface Design, Web Programming, and Virtualization.
Topics: Data insights
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