Job offers without candidates in a digital sector in full revolution: faced with the shortage of brains, tech companies compete to attract talent, even if it means employing them in total telework, sometimes on the other side of the world ( AFP/Archives/Martin BUREAU)
Job offers without candidates in a digital sector in full revolution: faced with the shortage of brains, tech companies are competing to attract talent, even if it means employing them in total telework, sometimes on the other side of the world.
Nicolas Pessemier, 44, has just left Silicon Valley to settle in Reno, Nevada, in “full remote” (the tech jargon for full telework, editor’s note) on behalf of Hopper, a site flight comparator. Fired by Google, which recently announced 12,000 job cuts, he had no trouble finding a new employer interested in his software developer profile.
“The + full remote + gives the possibility of deciding where we want to live, and if, in two months, we change our minds, we will be free to do so”, he says from his new home, which gives him also serves as an office.
On the other side of the Atlantic, Jordan Pittier, 35, is a developer for Gorgias, a Franco-American e-commerce support company. He also works from his home in Grenoble, in the Alps, saying he has chosen a setting “more conducive to family life” than Paris.
“I spoke to my boss about my move, it didn’t change anything for him because I was already fully teleworking,” he says.
With teams dispersed in Grenoble, Belgrade or Toronto, Romain Lapeyre, the founder of Gorgias, finds himself from San Francisco at the head of employees in several time zones.
Job offers without candidates in a digital sector in full revolution: faced with the shortage of brains, tech companies compete to attract talent, even if it means employing them in total telework, sometimes on the other side of the world ( AFP/Archives/Timothy A. CLARY)
“The choice of + full remote + has allowed us to speed up our recruitment process for engineering and product functions. We can thus access a larger talent pool”, he describes, with a hybrid organization, mixing Total or partial teleworking depending on the region.
This trend is at the very origin of the creation of the American company Remote, founded in 2019 to connect companies “wherever they are based, with qualified people, everywhere in the world”, explains Marguerite Monrose, France and Benelux manager of Remote.
The company, which employs a thousand people in 70 countries, operates itself in total teleworking, from accounting to human resources.
– Recruit cheaper –
So no more coffee and chouquettes with colleagues, it’s time for meetings via interposed screens. The trend is not entirely new in the tech professions, but it has gained momentum since the Covid. And the numerous waves of layoffs announced by Gafam do not change anything, according to specialists in the sector who see it as a way for companies to stand out in the hunt for talent.
So no more coffee and chouquettes with colleagues, it’s time for meetings via interposed screens. The trend is not totally new in the tech professions, but it has gained momentum since the Covid (AFP / Archives / Martin BUREAU)
“I had several job choices after leaving Google, and for me, the option of total telework was an important argument”, testifies Nicolas Pessemier.
This organization of work also makes it possible to recruit at much lower wages. For example, according to a report by the American firm Gartner in 2022, a data engineer (data specialist) costs 17,400 dollars in annual salary in New Delhi compared to 187,000 dollars in San Francisco.
The advantage is also administrative, explains Cyril Dupouey, from the consulting firm Meritis. “Before, the company took all the steps to bring an employee from another country, with all that entails of administrative delays. Thanks to + full remote +, the barrier of papers has been shattered, everything can be done at distance, even from very far”, he underlines.
“We previously witnessed the brain drain, for example from Europe, Africa or Asia to the United States. Today, with the rise of teleworking (…) talents remain in their country of origin,” adds Marguerite Monrose of Remote.
But the method also has its drawbacks, such as the difficulty of integrating junior employees, a corporate culture that is more difficult to transmit or very staggered schedules.
A pitfall experienced by Jordan Pittier, who once managed “a team of employees located in Paris, Quebec, Bucharest and Seattle: we had a ten-hour shift from East to West. It was tiring”, he acknowledges. In response, the sector began to recruit according to time zones, for greater fluidity.
© 2023 AFP
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