How to keep their ‘heads’ in the clouds? Tech execs debate employee retention

RALEIGH – Tech talent is hard to retain, and cloud leaders are feeling the effects.

Last year, up to 72 percent of US survey respondents said they were thinking of quitting their tech/IT jobs within the year, a huge jump from the 55 percent overall US average, TalentLMS reported.

Harold Zeishner, Director of Customer Experience at APC, moderated a panel about employee retention at today’s NC TECH State of Technology Conference.

“Specifically in technology, and even more specific to cloud, the demand far outweighs the supply.” said Zeishner.

A panel of execs talk employee retention at NC TECH conference. (Photo by Sarah Glova)

In the Triangle and across North Carolina, for example, NC TECH recently reported a record number of job openings while millions of positions across the country go unfilled.

The panel focused on employee retention as a crucial strategy in today’s war for talent.

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“We all know, it’s easier to keep the ones you’ve got than to find new ones,” said Andrea Fleming, Director of Talent and Workforce Development for NC TECH, as she introduced the panel.

The panel members represented both big tech and the startup community, with:

Jerry Tillman, Cloud Platform Development + Data Services at IBM
Kevin Robinson, President and CTO, RTriad Enterprises
Emily McBride, Head of People Operations at VacoBuilt
Jamie Howard, VP of Engineering at AllStacks

Tillman commented that big companies don’t necessarily have an advantage during the talent shortages and retention concerns.

“I think there’s a misconception, as far as the larger companies,” said Tillman. “I mean, we are racking our brains as well.”

How to retain cloud talent

Each panelist shared a specific tip for retaining cloud talent:

Promote career paths, not just jobs:

“One of the things employers are struggling with is, they talk jobs and not careers. And so making it clear to the candidates that they have career paths within your company is one of the primary ways to differentiate yourself,” said Robinson.

Benchmark to stay competitive:

“One thing that I am always doing is benchmarking. So looking at our competitors—looking at their salary, their pay structures and kind of how they compensate their employees—and making sure that we are up to speed after this conference today. I think I have about 15 compensation change letters to go draft up at my desk, but it’s because we’ve taken a really hard look at where are people out right now, what is the landscape, and how do we need to stay up to speed to retain our employees,” said McBride.

Connect to what people value:

“What are the motivating factors for the people? What are the motivating factors that you can provide?” said Howard.

“It’s more about what the values are. What do they value? For me, if you’re going to pay me an extra certain percentage, but that doesn’t allow for me to take my daughter to school, it’s not worth it.” said Tillman. “Because half of my career, I was rushing to get to the office and not being able to spend that time. And now, that’s more important to me than anything else.”

Treat your employees so well that they help you recruit:

“Your own existing happy engineers are your best resource at going and finding more happy engineers,” said Howard. “The engineers on my teams are better salespeople for what I do than I am. Internal referral rates are huge.”

The panel was shared during the 2022 State of Technology Conference, hosted by NC TECH. This year’s theme was, “Life in the cloud: What’s next?”