Hang around Western New York’’s technology scene long enough and you’re bound to hear the question about how to unleash thousands of University at Buffalo software engineering students on the local economy.
Enter a business software corporation that established a major hub in Buffalo two years ago.
Odoo has recruited 30 software engineers to the Buffalo office at Seneca One Tower this summer. Half are from UB. The other half are from out of town and most of them are in the United States on student visas.
The company has established a plan to sponsor the students who show promise as full-time employees, helping them gain H-1B visas and a long-term pathway for living and working in the United States.
There’s plenty of grumbling in Buffalo right now about the tight labor market for technologists. Odoo skipped right to the part about finding solutions.
“Many of these students leave town when they graduate in search of a company that will help extend their visa,” said Nick Kosinski, director of Odoo’s Buffalo office. “That opened the door to the idea that there is an opportunity to hire and retain software engineers in Buffalo.”
Belgium-based Odoo came to Buffalo after an intensive, countrywide analysis in 2020 and had 100 employees here by late 2021. The company is based locally at Seneca One, where it will begin to occupy a second full floor this summer.
Odoo initially established Buffalo as an East Coast operations center, but decided in late 2021 to build an engineering team here. By the time the interns begin, Odoo should have about 150 full-time employees in Buffalo. The plan is to be well past 200 in the coming years.
Odoo is hosting an event for potential employees on May 11. Dubbed AperOdoo, the free, public event will take place at the company's Seneca One Tower office.
Odoo’s other U.S. office is in San Francisco, the world’s ground zero for technology innovation, but also a place increasingly known for obscene prices for real estate and living costs and competition for engineering talent.
Odoo recruiter Elizabeth Vennari is a designer of the intern program. She manages the hiring process and has taken ownership of the visa sponsorship program. She said the company didn’t know what to expect when they posted the internship.
“It exploded,” she said. “We had hundreds of applications in the first week. We really tapped into a market that, especially in Buffalo, has not been taken advantage of yet.”
More than 2,500 people applied to the Odoo software internship in the last three months.
Odoo hasn’t just come into Buffalo with impressive hiring totals. The company has added a bit of chutzpah to a tech scene that still sometimes lacks for confidence. The company’s cheeky, purple billboards can be found on the I-190 and into the suburbs. Now the hiring plan cuts through generations of handwringing about how Buffalo can keep its talent from fleeing to Silicon valley.
The answer? Offer them something better and what they want.
“I would call us opportunistic,” Kosinski said. “We devised a strategy to test a hypothesis to see if our assumptions were right about hiring software talent. It happens that we were."
