Tech companies looking to hire in 2022 are searching for talent in a labor market that intensely competitive and evolving through the disruptions of the pandemic and great resignation.
The 2022 Portland Tech in Focus report by staffing firm ProFocus Technology revealed several data points illustrating the state of hiring in the industry locally.
- 85% of respondents expect upward wage pressure.
- 57% said a talent shortage is disrupting their companies' ability to meet key goals
- 68% of employees prefer remote work, with 43% saying they would leave their jobs if forced to work in office full time.
The Portland Business Journal spoke with leaders of three regional tech firms on their hiring plans for 2022 and their strategies for winning the competition for talent.
The Wild: Virtual culture
The maker a virtual and augmented reality collaboration tool, the pandemic and remote work make for an opportune time for Portland startup The Wild to double its size in the year ahead.
But one complication: engineers, a word CEO and founder Gabe Paez says with a hint of a sigh.
"Most skilled engineers can literally just work wherever they want, and they can make as much money as they want. It's just a question of showing them that this is the right match for the skills that they have to offer," he said in an interview. But securing talent in a competitive environment is "incredibly hard."
After recently doubling its workforce to 26, The Wild plans to double again to 60 people by the end of the year, with about half of the hires being for engineers, Paez said.
"There's so much competition right now for these positions. Though there are a lot of applicants, most of our applicants have multiple offers, multiple options. Competition amongst these companies is massive, he said. "Our challenge is really how to differentiate ourselves in the market."
The Wild is fully remote and employs people across time zones in the U.S. and internationally. Paez said that the strategy it follows is to create a fully remote work place unlike others that are "just built on Zoom and Slack," but is built around asynchronous collaboration, high-quality synchronous interaction around, and autonomy and trust for remote employees.
"A big part of it is not just taking the norms in terms of the way we work together synchronously in an office and just trying to apply them to 'Oh, now we work from wherever we are,'" Paez said.
The competition for talent has ballooned salaries and made it difficult for a small startup like The Wild to compete on salary with bigger firms who can throw more money at candidates. But Paez said he sees hiring as a kind of courting process in which both sides are looking for the right fit.
"The important thing that I've always tried to prioritize is that, especially with the salaries the way they are right now, ... especially in a small company, a bad hire can be catastrophic to the company. So it's way more important to hire the right person," Paez said. "And so we've just tried to stay patient with ourselves and do better at learning from our mistakes and try to find people and be creative around solutions."
Embed: Deliberate build-out
Michael Giles plans to take his fintech Embed to great heights in the financial industry, and he is looking for talent who is eager to join the journey.
"We want people who even if they could get 10 or 20% higher or somewhere else, it's not just about how much they're getting paid. It's about the work that they're doing. We want to find people that understand and are interested in the work that we're doing," Giles said. "Because our view is that Embed is going to be a far more valuable company in the future."
Vancouver-based Embed is developing a financial infrastructure platform that will allow customers to add stock trading to their products. It reeled in $60 million from investors in 2021, and founder and CEO Giles is ready to expand the company from 27 currently to about 60 by year's end.
He is looking to tap the Pacific Northwest labor market for engineering talent to mostly be based here, but he is not willing to spend "helicopter money" at talent just to reach a headcount.
"We're not just throwing money at people and going 'Please, please work with us.' We are choosing to just continue on our path, which is we know what we can afford to pay," Giles said.
Embed's needs are for experienced senior engineers who are self-starters who can contribute quickly. That makes for a "narrow funnel" for the company's recruiting.
"Obviously, you've got to find people at the right time when they're willing to change positions, because good engineers are going to be employed somewhere," Giles said.
Embed is trying to hire an HR head to build up its recruiting and hiring, but until now it has been looking to its network to bring in people its current employees know and can refer. Responsibility for recruiting falls on the CEO, too.
"One hundred percent. Yep," Giles said. "That's a key thing I work on, and to be honest with you, I think I should be spending more time on recruiting, because it's all about the people."
That is where Embed's potential comes in. Giles says the company is in a niche position in the financial industry and is positioned to grow into a big business. Engineers who start at Embed will be working on important pieces of what could be a major company.
"A lot of engineers will just work on some little tiny thing at some big company. Whereas at Embed, you're building services, micro services from scratch, and you get to take on that responsibility," he said. "So we would hope that we find people that appreciate the ability to take on that responsibility."
That strategy makes for a deliberate approach to hiring as Giles and Embed focus on building the startup's potential rather than hiring and growing headcount regardless of cost.
"We just want to kind of stick to our knitting, find people that understand what we're doing and appreciate what we're doing and understand the value that we can create," he said. "And not just chase people and keep paying up higher and higher prices."
Dutchie: Robust recruiting
Few tech companies in Oregon are growing as fast as Dutchie — or anywhere, according to the company, which boasts of being "one of the fastest-growing companies of all time in any vertical."
The cannabis tech company, which provides platforms to help dispensaries manage operations, reported a $350 million funding round in October, when it reported an employee headcount of 500.
Dutchie Chief People Officer Maria Manrique said via email the company doubled its employment in 2021 and is currently working on hiring 300 more.
"Many of our open roles are in high demand across most technology companies — software engineers, data scientists, product managers, and other technical roles. In addition, we have a growing demand for the roles that bring our technology products to market and ensure they thrive — implementation specialists and customer support staff, for example," Manrique wrote. "Demand for these roles has skyrocketed in recent years and competition is high."
Among the roles Dutchie plans to build up is in Manrique's purview. It has several open positions in talent acquisition, she wrote, a team that has "delivered impressive recruiting results amid a more competitive recruiting environment."
"As we kick off another record year of growth, one of the challenges we face is to grow our talent acquisition team fast enough to keep up with the staffing needs across all departments."
Dutchie is headquartered in Bend, but it is building its workforce everywhere as a remote-first company. Manrique said having the "overwhelming majority" of employees remote expands its reach in the labor market.
She added that the company is emphasizing internal mobility programs and career progression along with the tradition incentives of pay and benefits to compete in the labor market.
"This has been a key driver of our talent acquisition success," Manrique wrote. "We also see that candidates are attracted and inspired by Dutchie's mission to provide safe and easy access to cannabis, to drive positive societal change, and to promote social justice."
