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How America’s Most Popular Companies Are Winning the War for Talent

April 25, 2017 by Lacey Walters Leave a Comment


LinkedIn recently released its report listing the Top Attractors, the US-based companies with the strongest power to attract top talent. This list of the 40 most popular companies was compiled from billions of actions of job applicants, employees, and industry professionals. Find the full list on LinkedIn here, along with data for the world and selected other countries.

How does a company become a Top Attractor—the employer equivalent of a celebrity?

 

Their brand is idealism.

The main driver behind the success of Top Attractors is not their financials—or even their products—so much as their mission. Top Attractors have powerful branding that supports a lofty mission statement.

In 2009, Simon Sinek gave a clairvoyant TED Talk that described how the top companies of the last decade had succeeded in doing the impossible. It was called Start with Why, and it described how “people don’t buy what you do—they buy why you do it.” Many Fortune 500 companies have a large market share but fail to inspire top talent because people cannot trust or connect with their vision. On the other hand, Top Attractors want to change the world, and they convey it clearly to their customers.

Two-thirds of the companies on the list are run by founders. This is important: entrepreneurial founders have strong ideals and a gift for inspiring people with their mission. Elon Musk famously said he focuses on company rules at Tesla, because company ideals are “fairly obvious.” But even at Tesla, lofty ideals reign supreme. Elon Musk excels in harmonizing an environmentally friendly problem-solving message with beautiful technology that customers feel good supporting: stylish electric cars, affordable solar panels, reusable rockets, and self-driving technology.

Image: A $150,000+ investment in brand ideals. Tesla is #8 on the Top Attractors list.

A $150,000+ investment in brand ideals. Tesla is #8 on the Top Attractors list.

 

Uber describes its mission directly in its job descriptions, offering applicants “the rare opportunity to change the way the world moves. We’re not just another social web app, we’re moving real people and assets and reinventing transportation and logistics globally.”

 

Top Attractors create meaningful buzz.

Company size matters a little, but not much. The more important factor is their reach. These companies employ just 1.6 million people altogether. By contrast, the #1 Fortune 500 company (Wal-Mart) employs 2.1 million people worldwide, more than all 40 Top Attractors put together. However, the company has to have a big enough reach to create buzz and reach people deeply and often.

Even the most popular companies are not above negative press. The New York Times sharply criticized Amazon in 2015 for its “bruising workplace,” and Tesla faces possible bankruptcy if its Model 3 does not perform to standards. Apple has showed up in the media several times for horrendous factory conditions in China. But these same companies know that if people believe in them strongly enough, no bad press is strong enough to deter them.

Many of the founder-CEOs are household names: Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos. People follow them on social media and know what they think about politicians. They make outrageous claims about what projects they plan to tackle next. Sometimes they even tweet back. By comparison, Wal-Mart, Exxon Mobil, and CVS Health from the Fortune 500 list are faceless—and faceless corporations are not popular with many people.

 

Glamorous employers are stylish, surprising, and almost always B2C.

People want to work for the brands that make products they love, and so consumer-facing brands dominate the list. Out of the top 10 companies, 9 are omnipresent B2C brands, like Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon. All invest heavily in delighting customers and providing a seamless user experience loaded with helpful, free features. Their brands prioritize sleek innovation. People trust them because they always seem to be ahead of the curve.

Consumer products have the power to be status symbols, which holds incredible brand power. By contrast, B2B companies have a much harder time attracting top talent through brand value. People want to work for the companies whose mission and products align. Salesforce and Tableau are two notable exceptions. They achieve high brand visibility by putting themselves in front of top employees every day with a fresh, sleek product line and a forward-thinking philosophy.

[Image: iPhone progression]

Image: iPhone’s touchscreen technology amazed the world in 2007. Touchscreen technology was invented in the 1960s, and IBM released the first true smartphone in the 1990s, but Apple usually gets credit for both.

The element of surprise is fundamental to these brands. Apple’s culture of innovation has trained people to expect to be surprised and amazed at every new product. Each of the Top Attractors has magic in their brand, an appearance that they can do the impossible. This also drives competition. When competitors fail to delight and surprise their customers, Top Attractors gain both customer base as well as top talent looking to make a move to more exciting and popular companies. They are not loyal to the product as much as they are to the company and what it represents.

 

The most popular companies promise skills, not tenure.

Image: Jeff Bezos came under fire in 2015 for Amazon’s high turnover and troubled workplace culture.

Image: Jeff Bezos came under fire in 2015 for Amazon’s high turnover and troubled workplace culture.

Pressure is intense inside the halls of Top Attractor companies. Less than 15% of Amazon’s workforce survives beyond the 5-year mark. Even with huge perks, the fast-paced workplace forces many employees out after a short stint. Not only that, but salaries are not always the highest in the industry.

How do these popular companies continue to attract the best of the best? Because even a few years at a rockstar company like Facebook or Amazon can guarantee an employee success for years after they leave. The talent war has many layers, and companies compete strongly for alumni of top-performing companies to get access to their skills. Therefore, candidates feel that even if they burn out at a Top Attractor company, the skills they learn there will pay dividends for the rest of their career.

 

Need to attract better talent? Blue Signal can help. Contact us with your hiring need at: info@bluesignal.com.



Filed Under: Blog Posts Tagged With: amazon, apple, candidates, company culture, corporations, employee feedback, facebook, famous companies, google, hiring, most popular companies, talent war, tesla, top talent, uber

Top IoT Industry Trends of Q1 2017

April 19, 2017 by Lacey Walters Leave a Comment


The Internet of Things has enjoyed top buzzword status for a while now, but the technology has made steady strides away from the hype and towards a tangible, profitable reality. Here are the top trends of IoT since the start of 2017:

1. 3GPP Standardization of NB-IoT (Narrow-Band IoT) for LPWAN

NB-IoT technology took a leap forward last month when Cisco and Optus announced at Barcelona’s MWC they have completed live trials of NB-IoT technology on the Cisco Jasper platform. Most new connected devices are expected to launch on an LPWAN (Low Power Wireless Access Network) platform, especially inexpensive devices that use low levels of power and large ranges (smart umbrellas and toasters, for example).

NB-IoT is shorthand for Narrowband IoT (NB-IoT, also called LTE-M2). It is a radio technology standardization proposal developed by Huawei, Ericsson, Qualcomm, Vodafone, and other telecom heavy hitters. The Internet of Things is made up of hugely diverse smart devices—from airplanes to bracelets. To improve interoperability, NB-IoT was designed to allow many different types of devices and connectivity services to connect over cellular telecom bands—not just smartphones and tablets. Read more about NB-IoT here.

 

2. Connected Cars & Self-Driving Technology

CES 2017 was dominated by connected cars and related self-driving technology, with over 1000 exhibitors featured vehicle technologies or accessories. Tesla investors worried last year that self-driving technology would take a nosedive after one of their test drivers was killed last year in a fatal crash. However, commercial and private interest has grown by leaps and bounds. Uber got an early lead in the driverless tech race when it began testing driverless cars late last year in Phoenix, Pittsburgh, and San Francisco. Despite setbacks when a driverless car crashed in Arizona this month, the program is back on track. Google, Ford, and GM have also been testing self-driving technology in the United States.

Uber Self-Driving Car

Image credit: Business Insider

 

Intel is the biggest newcomer to the driverless technology arena. In a $15 billion deal on March 14, it purchased Mobileye, an OEM for driverless vehicle sensors and cameras. Uber’s driverless vehicles use a sophisticated combination of roof-mounted LiDAR sensors and color cameras to interpret the road. Intel is expected to scale similar digital vision technology components to sell to automakers that cannot make the huge investment necessary to develop the technology in-house.

CES 2017 Divergent 3D Connected Car

Image: At CES 2017, Divergent 3D unveiled the Blade, a 3D-printed connected car.

 

In the connected car software arena, AT&T boasts that it already connects 11 million cars on its network. Cisco’s Jasper IoT software now supports 50 vehicle brands, including Honda’s proprietary MyHonda Connected Car platform. Cisco has had many wins in the IoT arena with its Jasper platform, releasing smart solutions for fleet management, connected buildings, industrial equipment, and more. Over 9000 companies and 40 million smart devices run on Jasper’s Control Center software, with millions of devices being added every month.

 

5G Advancements

At Mobile World Congress 2017, South Korean carrier KT announced that it will have the world’s first commercially viable 5G network by 2019. While this is many years away from reality, many service providers are shifting discussions away from features to talk about standardization opportunities. Without a concerted standardization effort, 5G will likely take much longer to launch and be slower to grow once it does.

Ericsson recently launched its “5G for India” program to conduct 5G testing and ecosystem development in India. Many governments are considering their options for modernizing infrastructure to prepare for 5G, including China, the UK, and Thailand. Any country that gets an early lead in 5G availability will likely enjoy an economic leg-up over less connected countries. The challenge is that many infrastructure must be built from scratch, especially in countries with large rural areas.

 

IoT Security

Due to last October’s massive DDoS attack that used IoT device back doors to cause massive service outages, security is a top priority in the IoT space. Authentication and device-specific security are improving, but Sanjay Khatri, director of product marketing for IoT Services at Cisco, says that IoT security “takes a village.” If the network is secure but hackers can penetrate the device itself, the security chain has failed. Security is necessary at every link of the IoT value chain.

Information security is an escalation war, and providers at all levels are racing to protect IoT devices and applications against digital attacks. One of the most important IoT security measures already in use is REST-based APIs, which protects the movement of data between devices, applications, and back-end systems. Many device manufacturers are building two-step or even three-step authentication features into their devices. Instead of a single password, many connected things use biometrics (like a fingerprint) or digital certificates in addition to passwords and PINs. Beyond the device layer, cloud platforms like Cisco Jasper rout the data through VPN tunnels to prevent DDoS and similar network-wide outage attacks.

 

Have a hiring need or questions about the IoT industry? Contact us for a free consultation at info@bluesignal.com.



Filed Under: Blog Posts Tagged With: 3d printed, 3GPP, 4G, 5g, ces, connected cars, connected devices, cybersecurity, emerging technology, internet of things, iot, job market, LPWAN, lte, m2m, NB-IoT, self driving car, smart devices, technology, uber, wireless

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