With less than three months to go until graduation, many college students are hard at work fine tuning their resumes and scheduling job interviews. And companies from across the mobile ecosystem are busy recruiting.
“We hire a lot of people right out of college,” said AT&T’s Matt Beattie, executive director of product marketing for AT&T’s fiber to the building program. “We teach them business-to-business sales, because it’s a way for them to learn a lot about technology and problem solving in a short period of time.” Beattie says that at AT&T, a business-to-business sales position in his group can be a gateway into many other parts of the business.
But the competition for technical talent is fierce, particularly when it comes to software. “Everybody is looking for software people … there’s a huge explosion,” said Beverley Principal, associate director of employment services at Stanford. “Mobile is pretty high on the list for students because they know it so well.” Principal says during the last 12 to 18 months she has seen an increase in recruiting activity from Apple, Samsung, Qualcomm, Broadcom and Nvidia. She sees much less activity from the carriers.
Corporate recruiters say their clients have more job openings than they can fill, particularly when it comes to software developers based in California. Ironically, some companies outside Silicon Valley are now finding it easier to attract software talent than are those in California, which is home to Apple, Qualcomm, Broadcom and Nvidia.
“The Midwest (Silicon Prairie) has a growing focus for entrepreneurs and technology jobs without the overhead from a cost of living perspective,” said Kevin McGinnis, VP of product development for Sprint Nextel. “So, we do attract a unique set of developers without having to compete with the hundreds of other technology companies on the coasts.”
Pittsburgh has attracted a lot of technical talent for Smith Micro Software, which creates software solutions for carriers, device makers and original equipment manufacturers. And With “great universities nearby, the caliber of recent grads is very high,” said Tran Lam, human resources manager at Smith Micro.
Employers looking for software skills like to hire computer science majors, information systems majors and electrical engineers, but often there are not enough graduates in those disciplines to fill their needs, so hirers branch out. “Now employers are starting to look beyond that … now they look at math and they look at biomedical computation … they have same skill sets because they take the computer science classes,” said Stanford’s Principal.
AT&T’s Beattie says he likes to hire people with backgrounds in computer science, math or engineering because all of those disciplines require critical thinking. “What you learn in those disciplines is how to be flexible when you do that thinking,” said Beattie. “We’re less interested in particular software development skills than in someone who can take a look at a particular problem that a customer is having and use that same kind of critical thinking that you use when you write code.”
Beattie said college grads who have tried to create their own mobile apps are particularly interesting to his group, since AT&T now markets enterprise applications to businesses. He looks for candidates with a combination of mobile application experience and communication skills, with the goal of finding people who can “take that mobile app and make it something that the customer understands on their own.”
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