Seattle’s Tech Job Crunch: How Long Can the Valley Invaders Poach from Microsoft, Amazon Before the Talent Well Runs Low?

Curt Woodward3/28/11Follow @curtwoodward

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around 1999. When the state cuts its support, universities like UW respond by adding more out-of-state students to the mix because they pay a higher, unsubsidized tuition rate.

“It kind of sucks that the children of Washington parents can’t get into the University of Washington and pursue a STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) degree because there’s not enough slots,” says entrepreneur Jeremy Jaech, chairman of the Technology Alliance. “But it’s not likely to change anytime soon.”

Meanwhile, signs of the coming tech job stampede continue to build all around Seattle. Facebook opened its office here last fall and is growing. Since then, Zynga, Splunk, and Jawbone also have announced expansions to the area. Twitter has purchased local startup Cloudhopper, and Salesforce.com recently moved into expanded digs in South Lake Union. Google, a relative veteran on the Seattle scene, keeps on hiring.

Established companies are still doing their bit. My search of the job board on Microsoft’s corporate site turned up at least 534 tech jobs in the region—it’s probably a lot more than that, but several of the biggest categories hit the 100-job search limit. The Seattle Times recently pegged Amazon job postings for tech talent at more than 900, and Google recently told the paper that its area offices ended 2010 with about 800 people. According to data compiled for Xconomy by job-search aggregator Indeed, there are around 1,300 unique postings for software engineers in the greater Seattle area right now.

In that kind of environment, it’s no wonder smaller companies are having to work a lot harder to find workers. Among them is SEOmoz, the Seattle-based company that recently started offering a $12,000 bounty to anyone who refers a successfully hired software engineer. It’s an aggressive, but well-established tactic in California that stirred up some headlines in the Seattle area. Chief Executive Rand Fishkin says SEOmoz got about 300 candidates based on the promotion. But he had to get the company in front of about 60,000 to 100,000 eyeballs to generate those leads, and after several weeks of combing through resumes, SEOmoz had hired just two people out of the roughly 10 they were shooting for when I talked to him last week.

“Two years ago, you put a job on Craigslist, you’d have 50 to 100 applicants. Times have really changed,” Fishkin says. “An ad on Craigslist from us now gets 20 to 30 applicants. The vast majority of them are clearly not qualified.”

Fishkin is a little bemused by the situation. After all, he says, SEOmoz is a steadily growing, profitable business that offers a small-company atmosphere to techies who don’t want to get lost in the vast hallways of a major corporate campus. Since when was that such a hard sell?

“It does make you feel weird,” Fishkin says. “It makes you feel that there’s something strange going on in the market when you’re not an exciting company.”

Curt Woodward is a senior editor for Xconomy. Email: cwoodward@xconomy.com Follow @curtwoodward