What kind of perks draw tech executives and talent to a city? Job opportunity is key, but so is community, according to three Nashville-based tech leaders who participated in a panel discussion Thursday hosted by the Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce.
“There’s a lot of the things that get invented in Silicon Valley at bars in Palo Alto,” said Neil de Crescenzo, CEO of Emdeon, a leading provider of revenue and payment cycle management and clinical information exchange solutions.
de Crescenzo, who relocated to Nashville from the Silicon Valley last year, commended the city on its welcoming atmosphere for newcomers and its efforts to develop a local pipeline of tech talent, but cited the need for more forums to bring innovators together. Fostering that dynamism “attracts the best of the best earlier in their careers,” he added.
The discussion marked the one-year anniversary of WorkIT, a marketing campaign launched by the Chamber and other regional entities to recruit more talent to fill 800-plus jobs created by an influx of tech firms across the area as well as a growing need for tech workers in health care, music and entertainment, and several of the city’s more traditional industries.
Along with a team of local advocates who promote the city’s tech scene and opportunities via social media, a central part of WorkIT is a website that showcases Nashville tech jobs. Already the site has attracted 2,000 job seekers setting up profiles, facilitated 182,000 job searches and generated more than 116 million impressions from people in 3,649 cities and 139 countries.
The bar is high for tech talent these days, especially in emerging areas like information security and mobile development, said de Crescenzo, who called the field “still more of an art than a science.” Casting a wide net is crucial to attracting the best and the brightest software developers and IT professionals, he said, and branding can go a long way.
“It’s about getting the message out there,” he said, citing Austin, Texas and its South by Southwest festival as a prime example of how a city can create a buzz around its technology scene.
Qualifacts CEO David Klements, who moved to Nashville from New York a decade ago, agreed. “Nashville is a great place to build a business and a family, but the first thing you have to do is get people here,” he said.
The city is full of opportunities for creative collaboration — but the key is exposing recruits to that and it can be as simple as bringing them to events like Live on the Green, said Klements, who walks up the street with his staff to the weekly outdoor concert series every Thursday night throughout the fall.
“Nashville has a close-knit community, but it’s about shining the spotlight on what is going on,” Klements says. “We need to start telling our story more favorably, and the world will listen.”
via:http://businessclimate.com/blog/2014/02/tech-talent-going/
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