While the tech industry is leading the layoffs in the U.S. — which reached its highest level since the Great Recession in February — one sector of the industry is having a hard time finding the right recruits, and it’s starting a war for talent where offers are reportedly reaching up to $1 million.
In addition to hefty compensation packages, companies ranging from small startups to industry leaders such as OpenAI and Meta are offering accelerated stock-vesting schedules and even trying to poach entire teams, the Wall Street Journal reported.
“There is a secular shift in what talents we’re going after,” Naveen Rao, head of Generative AI at Databricks, told the Journal.“We have a glut of people on one side and a shortage on the other.”
ChatGPT-maker OpenAI reportedly offered a median salary (including bonus and equity) of $925,000, Zuhayeer Musa, co-founder of compensation data and career platform Levels.fyi, told the Journal. Six OpenAI job candidates had consulted with Levels.fyi about their offers. Meanwhile, among 344 machine learning and AI engineers at Meta, the median compensation including bonus and equity was around $400,000, according to salaries they reported to Levels.fyi.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has even written personal emails to AI researchers at Google’s DeepMind to convince them to work at Meta, sources told The Information. The company, which is focused on developing an AI model to power recommendations for videos on its platforms, has also reportedly offered jobs to candidates sans interviews, and has stepped back on its policy of not offering higher salaries to employees with job offers from competitors.
Tech giants including Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, and Meta have all announced layoffs this year, partly to refocus on AI development. Many tech companies also over-hired in 2021 during a boom in the IPO market and startup funding, but have since cited restructuring and economic conditions as reasons for recent layoffs.
“Businesses are aggressively slashing costs and embracing technological innovations, actions that are significantly reshaping staffing needs,” Andrew Challenger, a labor and workplace expert at Challenger, said in a recent layoffs report.