Google and Facebook's massive hiring spree in London has been fuelled by talent lured away from British and European startups
Silicon Valley’s aggressive push into London has been met with positive headlines but could turn out to be disastrous for the city’s flourishing tech startup ecosystem, which is the largest in Europe by some distance.
Google is building a campus for 7,000 people behind King’s Cross train station, while Facebook announced at the end of 2018 that it was leasing two large buildings down the road, bringing its total London workforce up to around 2,300 staff. A couple of miles to the east, in Shoreditch, the beating heart of the London startup scene, Amazon opened a new office in 2017 that increased its total U.K. workforce to 5,000 staff.
This hiring spree is good news for talent but a headache for the founders of British and European startups. It typically takes six to 12 weeks to identify, attract, interview and hire an experienced software developer in London, according to Buckley. To rub salt into the wounds, U.S. tech giants have been stealing Improbable’s technical recruiters to help them find more staff. Improbable lost talent partner Andrew Pickup to Google in March 2019, where he now works as a technical recruiter, and technical recruiter Francesca Barile left to join Amazon in February 2019. Improbable declined to comment.
“The big tech giants are looking to hire as many as they can. But for tech talent, the giants are starting to feel more like corporates,” said Kassai. “We’re equally finding that seniors want to join startups.” While Silicon Valley firms are offering a lot of money to their U.K. staff, they pay their U.S. staff a lot more. “There’s an awful lot of incredulity from U.S.-based tech folk that London pay is so low by comparison to the West Coast,” said Buckley.
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