The Greater Nashville Technology Council officially embarked Thursday on tech-talent hunting trips to Boston, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, Silicon Valley, and Washington, D.C.
Tech workers in those six major markets are the target of a new marketing campaign aimed at enticing them to relocate to Greater Nashville — a land where there are more tech jobs open than there are workers to fill them.
The Business Journal previewed the budding "TechIntoNashville" push in the spring. Now is its full-throated launch, featuring this video that spotlights employees of companies and employees that have moved to Nashville. They include:
- Yoshi, which provides on-site gas delivery and car-care services. The company, led by CEO Bryan Frist, relocated its headquarters from Silicon Valley at the end of 2020.
- An applications specialist from cloud-computing company VMware Inc. (NYSE: VMW) who moved from Chicago to Nashville in 2020.
- Multiple employees of AllianceBernstein (NYSE: AB), which paid to produce the video. One worker made sure to note that his commute to the money manager's former New York home base lasted nearly two hours, each way. It's less than 20 minutes for him to reach the new downtown Nashville headquarters.
The campaign: The anchor is the website TechIntoNashville.com. LinkedIn ads and search-engine ads will drive traffic to the website, as well as social media and ads on internet-connected TVs. The video above has been sliced into 15- and 30-second bits to help push the message, said Brian Moyer, CEO of the tech council.
Lifespan: "This needs to live for at least three years to have the effect we're looking for," Moyer told the Business Journal.
Investors: So far, nine organizations have agreed to a three-year financial commitment to fuel the effort. They are: AllianceBernstein; Amazon.com Inc. (Nasdaq: AMZN); Change Healthcare (Nasdaq: CHNG); Dollar General Corp. (NYSE: DG), HCA Healthcare Inc. (NYSE: HCA); Ncontracts; TechnologyAdvice; Tractor Supply Co. (Nasdaq: TSCO); and, Vanderbilt University.
The target: The Tech Council wants to double the region's tech workforce by 2025, to a total of 92,000 workers in that field. The region has one of the smallest tech workforces in the nation, but it's also the fastest-growing since 2015, according to research from CBRE Group Inc. (NYSE: CBRE).
New arrivals: The demand for talent is surging just from inbound companies such as Amazon, NTT Data Services, Facebook (Nasdaq: FB) — and the 8,500 jobs that Oracle Corp. (NYSE: ORCL) plans for its waterfront tech campus. Just this week, the NBJ exclusively reported that IT company Capgemini is setting up a Midtown office that could eventually employ 1,000 people.
Attention: As of mid-morning Thursday, Moyer already had received interview requests from Chicago and Atlanta.
