Google vs. Facebook: The Hiring War Kicks into High Gear

The hiring war has recently kicked into high gear between the two silicon valley behemoths, Google and Facebook. For years the two have been jostling for the best engineering talent in the Valley, however, the last few days have marked a peak in the battle between the two.

Google just announced on its employment website that it has 2,073 job openings for positions within the company’s various locations around the world. That’s on top of the more than 23,000 people the company currently employs. Google also upped the ante by giving a 10% raise to all of its employees (minus the one fired employee who blew the whistle on the raises before a formal public announcement).

Facebook meanwhile has recently been a nasty thorn in Google’s side by poaching high-tier engineering talent and adding to their some 1,700 employees. From Financial Feed.net: “Among the 137 Facebook recruits came from Google including Lars Rasmussen, co-founder of Google Maps; Matthew Papakipos, Google Chrome architect; Erick Tseng, senior product manager of Android; and Google’s top ad executive David Fischer.”

Facebook is combating Google’s unprecedented “war chest” of money by offering employees pre-IPO stock offerings, which Google obviously cannot provide. This option is incredibly alluring for potential employees given the recent hype around Facebook (the ‘Social Network’ movie couldn’t have hurt anything but Mark Zuckerburg’s feelings) and the value that an IPO could reap even for those on the ground floor of the company.

Talent clearly is a key ingredient to the future of both of these companies; as they move into similar territories (local recommendations & social networking) they’ve both needed to hone in on those engineers who are specialists. The company that can land the top talent in these fields will gain the short and long-term technology edge. So what else can the recruiting departments of these two tech Goliaths do to land those brainiacs as well as retain the talent they already have? Beyond the basics, here are a few items:

– Daily Finance brings up a great point about Google’s famous 20% time system. Although letting employees use 20% of their time to pursue their own projects is a great way to promote innovation and new ideas within the company, it also can be frustrating for those employees who don’t see their ideas come to fruition. These employees are more likely to jump ship for a smaller start up where they have more creative input.

– The simple concept of collaboration in a hiring department can make all the difference. When recruiters are all firing on different gears and going after individual employees for various departments, the hiring process can often become disconnected. Lines might not be drawn between connections between like-employees, past synergies and former friendships that could make the difference between a successful hire and or a loss to the competition. Modern day applicant tracking software can often fix this problem, allowing hiring managers and recruiters to expertly collaborate, track candidates and analyze impediments and points of progress.

– Although Facebook is already painting itself as the smaller, younger, more relevant and hip company, they need to kick this marketing push into high gear. Not only should Google be painted as a bigger, slower moving company – they should be painted as simply old and out-of-touch. A broad marketing campaign across a variety of mediums could do just the trick. Facebook needs to realize that all those kids watching Justin Bieber on MTV today could end up as their future engineering stars.