Companies Go Into High Gear Looking for High-Tech Talent

The scramble to find high-tech talent, already feverish for several years in Silicon Valley, has spread across the country.

Corporate America’s intense demand for people with computer-related skills was reflected in a poll this month of 402 big and medium-size U.S. employers: 48.5% reported that they found information systems workers in scarce supply, a figure far higher than for any of the other 10 job categories listed.

When it comes to high-tech workers, “companies that have been downsizing, downsizing and downsizing now find themselves scratching for talent . . . and they’re in competition with many other companies in the same hole,” said Eric Greenberg, research director for the American Management Assn., which conducted the survey.

What’s more, a separate survey of 1,400 U.S. companies with 100 or more employees found that hiring for information technology workers is even brisker in several parts of the country, particularly the New York-New Jersey-Pennsylvania region, than it is on the West Coast.

For companies struggling to fill technical jobs, “I don’t think there is any end in sight,” said Greg Scileppi, executive director of RHI Consulting, the high-tech staffing firm that released the second survey. “Technology continues to advance at breakneck speeds.”

The tight supply of talent is shaking up the way employers recruit and hold onto personnel with computer-related skills. For instance, while newspaper and magazine advertising remains the favorite recruiting tool, the AMA poll found that 53% of the companies surveyed are posting job openings on the Internet.

In addition, 23% of the companies in the same poll say they are hiring more foreign nationals than they did three years ago.

Other companies are paying signing bonuses and awarding stock options to new hires. Also being handed out are referral bonuses, typically in the $500-$2,000 range, to employees who persuade friends or acquaintances with high-tech skills to go to work for their companies.

Observers say that high-tech companies, long notorious for burning out technical staffers with 60-hour workweeks, are increasingly encouraging telecommuting and offering other sought-after benefits to try to reduce the traditionally high turnover.

Meanwhile, electrical engineering and computer science graduates at schools such as USC are being flooded with job offers.

“There are more jobs than there are students,” said Carmen Serrano, head of the school’s job placement program for engineering students. For job interviews, she said, students “are flying all over the place.”

Klara Moradkhan, due to receive a bachelor’s degree from USC in May with a combined major in computer science and computer engineering, said she already has gotten three solid offers. The lowest starting salary among them would be $37,000, and she is awaiting word from a company that she believes may top her current highest offer of $45,000.

Moradkhan has gotten so many requests from companies for job interviews that she has had to turn down many of them.

“Every day when I go home, and there are calls from three or four companies . . . I just don’t have the time.”

Employment experts say the skilled workers sought by employers aren’t just computer hardware and software designers and engineers. Also in demand are salespeople and human resources professionals with computer expertise. Competition is particularly keen in the Silicon Valley.

“It’s the strongest market I’ve ever seen,” said Bob Lee, who heads a San Jose-based division of the employment firm Manpower Inc. and who has been involved in staffing Silicon Valley firms for 26 years.

Among skilled workers in the Silicon Valley, he said, “if someone is unemployed, it’s pretty hard to understand why.”

Meanwhile, employers have resorted to ever more aggressive and creative recruiting techniques.

One of the most aggressive is Cisco Systems Inc., a San Jose-based company that provides Internet-related networking equipment, a particularly hot area in the current job market.

Both in Silicon Valley and in the Research Triangle area of North Carolina, where it has another major facility, Cisco runs ads at movie theaters and sets up booths at such diverse events as jazz festivals and home and garden shows to publicize the company. Cisco has also used an electronic billboard in San Francisco and hosted a morning radio show on its corporate campus to spread the news about its job openings.

Some of the creative juices of Silicon Valley’s recruiters got flowing after Apple Computer Inc. announced last month that it would fire 4,100 employees. Adaptec Inc., a computer communications company, responded by hiring a pilot to fly low over Apple’s Cupertino headquarters during morning and evening rush hours displaying a banner announcing an Adaptec job fair.

“It’s attention-getting,” Adaptec spokesman Bruce Frymire said. “We’ll probably do it again.”

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Times staff writer Stuart Silverstein can by reached by e-mail at stuart.silverstein@latimes.com or by phone at (213) 237-7887.