A Look At Who’s Winning The Talent Wars In Tech (Hint: It Rhymes With Twitter)

There’s been a lot of talk about the fierce competition for talent among the top players in the tech industry. As the story goes, Facebook has been the primary source of anguish for its competitors, seemingly bearing the gravitational pull of a giant sun. Even the ubiquitous Google was forced to take some extraordinary measures to stem the flow of top talent to Facebook last year by offering exorbitant counteroffers as well as a 10 percent, company-wide salary increase. Then-CEO Eric Schmidt called it a “war for talent”.

Bringing in top talent can change (and cement) a company’s future, and Google is not the only company willing to go to great lengths to keep (and nurture) talent within its ranks. But, up to this point, there’s been little understanding of who is actually winning (and losing) the war for recruiting top talent in the tech industry, especially in Silicon Valley. Today, thanks to Top Prospect, the social recruiting site that rewards users for helping their friends find jobs, we now have a snapshot of where we stand in the great talent wars of the 21st century. (Not to over-dramatize or anything.)

To find out, Top Prospect dug into its data and culled together information from over 2.5 million profiles in their database. Their findings (based on the number of users that have changed jobs in the last 2 years), perhaps unsurprisingly, show that Google, Facebook, Microsoft, LinkedIn, and Apple have been the companies to gain the most new talent.

Likely the only slight surprise among that group is Microsoft. After all, Google and Apple are enjoying billions in revenues, LinkedIn just loudly went public, and Facebook has gone Hollywood.

Yet, when we look at the companies who were on the flip side — those that saw the most employees leave for greener pastures — the losing leaders include Microsoft, Yahoo!, Google, eBay, and Amazon.

But, wait a minute, how can Google and Microsoft be both winning and losing? To solve this statistical enigma, Top Prospect broke it down into a ratio to compare how many new people were hired for each employee the company lost. The winner? Twitter with nearly 11 new hires for every employee lost. Facebook is not far behind at 8.1, rounded out by Zynga (8.0), LinkedIn (7.5), and Groupon (3.9).

This looks like an IPO All Star Team.

And the losers?

Intuit (1.2), Google (1.2), eBay (0.8), Microsoft (0.4), and Yahoo! (0.3). Looks like Google isn’t faring so well after all.

For those companies at the bottom of the chain, that are losing 2 to 4 people for every hire, you might want to call Top Prospect for help …

And for good measure, because you’ve been good readers, here’s a graph that highlights movement of talent among the big players. All roads, it seems, point to Facebook.