The Music City wants a piece of the Windy City's tech talent.
The city of Nashville is embarking on an "aggressive" marketing campaign this month that targets tech workers in Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Boston and Washington, D.C. Led by the Greater Nashville Technology Council, the "TechIntoNashville" initiative is part of a push to double the tech workforce in middle Tennessee by 2025.
The group chose those six cities to target based on their concentration of tech talent and workers' potential desire to move due to high taxes and expensive cost of living, the campaign says. The recruiting messages will soon appear in SEO ads, social media, TV, online video and online native advertising.
“We are positioned to attract a world-class tech force,” Nashville Mayor John Cooper said in a statement. “Coders and engineers can go anywhere they want, sure. But they’re not going to find a more vibrant, creative city than Nashville, and that’s only becoming more true.”
Nashville's resume as an emerging tech center has been boosted in recent years thanks to tech expansions from companies like Amazon, who's bringing 5,000 jobs to the city as part of its HQ2 announcement. Facebook also recently announced plans to build an $800 million data center in the area, and Oracle is planning a massive 8,500-job tech hub on Nashville’s riverfront.
Nashville also minted two new unicorns this year in Silicon Ranch and Built Technologies.
Chicago, meanwhile, is currently undergoing its own push to attract tech talent from other metros. P33, a local nonprofit that's aiming to turn Chicago into a top-tier tech hub, is spearheading a marketing campaign that aims to bring back 10,000 techies who left the city. It's targeting tech workers in San Francisco, New York, Seattle, Los Angeles, Boston, Atlanta, Denver, Austin, Dallas and Washington, DC. Mayor Lori Lightfoot took a trip to Silicon Valley this summer to personally recruit entrepreneurs to Chicago, bringing with her a handful of local tech executives from Ocient, Rheaply, M1 Finance and other firms to showcase the city's tech prowess.
The City of Chicago also recently took out full page ads in the Dallas Morning News to encourage businesses to relocate to Chicago following Texas' ban on abortions after six weeks of pregnancy.
The recruitment push is indicative of how fiercely competitive the tech talent market is across the U.S., especially as the remote work revolution increases. Nashville's tech council says it plans to run its recruitment campaign for a minimum of three years.
