Tech companies still hiring despite mass lay-offs elsewhere - Financial Times

Tech companies are still hiring feverishly as they move to take advantage of a world shifting increasingly to digital as a result of the coronavirus, despite mass lay-offs elsewhere and growing concerns over plummeting global markets.

In California alone, tech companies were looking to fill 15,852 jobs in the second week of March — down only slightly from the week before and nearly three times the level from a year ago, ZipRecruiter data show.

Even on Tuesday, one day after six counties in the Bay Area announced a “shelter in place”, 2,414 new tech jobs were posted, down only 9.6 per cent from 2,671 a week before.

“We don’t see any drop-off in tech — the job patterns are pretty much what we’d expect if there were no coronavirus,” said Julia Pollak, labour economist at ZipRecruiter, an employment marketplace.

Apple, Lyft, Uber, Adobe and Twitch were also among the companies posting new listings on Wednesday morning.

The hiring spree contrasts with a dramatic slowdown in other industries. Job postings in aviation collapsed 44 per cent last week from a year ago, while catering tumbled 39 per cent, hotels fell 24 per cent and restaurants were down 26 per cent, according to ZipRecruiter.

As companies “radically rethink” how they operate in light of escalating restrictions, the need for software skills is also likely to extend well beyond the tech sector, said Stuart Carlaw, chief researcher at ABI Research.

“The market for technology jobs is likely to remain strong in the face of Covid,” he said. “Labour intensive companies have to increasingly embrace digital components to remain solvent.”

For Ms Pollak, the virus outbreak is accelerating trends that were already brewing in the economy. “This is clearly a time when bricks-and-mortar stores will shift to ecommerce . . . when restaurant meals will shift to delivery,” she said. “So this is actually a breakout moment for tech companies.”

She said ZipRecruiter itself, last valued at $1.5bn, expects growth to keep up. “There’s no hiring freeze and we have no plans on slowing down.”

Other tech start-ups said they, too, still planned to increase headcount even as the pandemic forces more employees to work from home — in part because many of the challenges of a distributed workforce are less severe for the tech sector.

“The beautiful thing about [coding] is you can write software from your quarantine,” said Mark Gordon, chief executive of Skyryse, a helicopter automation start-up.

Still, there are some major difficulties. There’s no handbook for interviewing applicants without getting within six feet of them.

“The candidate hiring experience is totally bizarre right now,” said Jason Boehmig, chief executive of legal automation software group IronClad. On Sunday he made an offer to someone for a senior role after a remote interview process. “Now,” he said, “we're going to have to figure out how this actually works.”

Others, however, say they were hiring as recently as last week but that escalating movement restrictions have shaken their confidence.

The chief executive of a hard sciences start-up with 160 employees recounted last Wednesday: “We had a handful of offers we were getting ready to make and I was very clear with the team: let's make those offers.”

However by Tuesday morning, he said that confidence “feels like forever ago now”. He has since enacted a hiring freeze on the company for three weeks. “Assuming the full shutdown is just the three weeks, we'll keep hiring,” he said, “but now it looks more uncertain and we plan to reassess.”