“The Great Resignation” has become a commonplace expression, but it’s also a misleading one. While it’s true resignation rates have risen as a share of overall employment, unemployment in the tech sector is very low, leading to companies having to fight to find new hires and boost benefits and compensation.
We were curious to see if recent hiring trends could be broken down by geography — were tech companies struggling to hire workers all across the country, or were there hotspots for faster or slower hiring? We decided to look into job listing data to evaluate hiring velocity and how it breaks down by major cities and states.
Hiring velocity is a useful tool for evaluating companies, both for gauging the growth of early-stage startups and for detecting the stagnation or decline of established firms. It can be useful to measure not just how many employees a company has added over a certain period of time, but also the length of time taken to fill a role after posting the job listing.
Founders find this data valuable for tracking their startup’s performance — and that of their competitors — and investors take notice too. AngelList, for example, recently launched a fund that uses hiring velocity data to determine where investments land.
To generate an overview of the hiring velocity of tech companies in the past year, we used data on the job listings of top tech companies from The Business of Business’s parent company, Thinknum. By tracking thousands of job listings daily, Thinknum can determine when a listing disappears from a hiring site — an indication that the role has been filled. We used this to evaluate which cities and states are seeing the fastest and slowest hiring. Here’s what we found.
How tech companies stack up
To track hiring velocity in the tech sector, we limited our analysis to companies with greater than 2,500 job listings tracked by Thinknum for analysis over the past year.
The two companies that top our list for slowest hiring will be strangers to no one, yet this outcome may be surprising to some. Should their slow hiring velocity be looked at as a sign of their decline? Probably not — since interest in working at Google or Apple is very high among tech workers, those companies typically take their time in deciding between the pool of workers available for any given role.
The fastest- and slowest-hiring cities on our list
We looked at cities with at least 50 listings from companies on our list to come up with this ranking for the fastest- and slowest-hiring cities in tech. Cities are ranked by the average number of days needed to fill a role.
The fastest cities on this list were home to job listings from SAP, Leidos Holdings, and VMWare. A suburb of Chicago 20 miles west of downtown, Downers Grove, the fastest on the list at 7 days, is home to a branch office of the German-based software company SAP. The company also has smaller offices in Herndon and Bellevue.
Leidos Holdings, the Reston-headquartered company which focuses on IT, engineering, and biomedicine, has offices in Herndon, Chantilly, and Colorado Springs. Over the past year, according to Thinknum data, Leidos has shown a slight increase in overall job listings.
The Covid pandemic has also changed the landscape of hiring in America for tech companies. Remote job listings are now common, as larger firms face the challenge of employees reluctant to return to the workplace. Early changes in hiring velocity in mid-size cities could be indications of geographic shifts brought on by this change.
The list of ten slowest cities, conversely, features cities that were home to listings from Apple, which hired for a slew of positions in Santa Clara, Calif., and Google, as well as the other companies on our list that tend to hire more slowly. Apple’s hiring over the past year was dominated by jobs in software/services and hardware over the past year, according to Thinknum’s data.
Mountain View, the California city known for housing Google’s headquarters, ranked fifth on our list, reflecting Google’s lengthy process for considering new hires. The search giant also hired for lots of roles in Kirkland, Wash., San Bruno, Calif. (home of YouTube), Redwood City, Calif., Cambridge, Mass., San Francisco, Sunnyvale, Calif., and New York. The company requires several rounds of interviews to fill most roles.
The fastest- and slowest-hiring states on our list
As with cities, the difference in time it takes to fill roles between the fastest and slowest states shows a wide divide. It takes two weeks longer to hire for a job in Oregon than in Mississippi, for example.
Leidos Holdings and SAP were again behind the majority of the job listings in our fastest-hiring states list.
Of note here: Leidos’s office in Hawaii hired for a total of 154 positions according to Thinknum’s data, the most out of the five states on this list.
While New York and California may be unsurprising entries on this list, given the significant presence Apple and Google have in each state, the placement of Wisconsin at number 1 is more puzzling. The state is hardly a hotbed of tech hiring, compared to the 6,880 and 1,225 jobs filled in the past year in California and New York according to our data, however, Wisconsin only filled 74. But it turns out that most of the roles filled in Wisconsin were internships at Google, where, as we know, hiring tends to move slowly.
About the Data:
Thinknum tracks companies using the information they post online, jobs, social and web traffic, product sales, and app ratings, and creates data sets that measure factors like hiring, revenue, and foot traffic. Data sets may not be fully comprehensive (they only account for what is available on the web), but they can be used to gauge performance factors like staffing and sales.