Times are not good for employment in Big Tech. Over the past few months Microsoft, Meta, Amazon or Google have announced more or less severe job cuts. And that to cite some of the best known cases. Sometimes the cuts come after years of growing and gaining muscle during the worst of the pandemic, when online commerce and social media boomed with a glee some thought would survive COVID. However, not the entire sector has suffered to the same extent. What’s more, one of its branches, that of agricultural equipment, is discovering an opportunity to attract new talent.
Examples there are a few. And top notch.
Snip goes, snip comes. In Layoffs.fyi they have looked back and when calculating the layoffs registered in the technology sector since the beginning of 2022, they have come up with a balance of almost 288,800 people. Only the Big Tech already leave a more than remarkable balance. In short: between the end of last year and the beginning of this year, Meta has announced a snip of some 11,000 jobs, Google 12,000, Amazon 18,000, Microsoft 10,000, Ericsson 8,500 and Twitter 3,700.
add and follow. You don’t have to look far to find news about HR departments on the wane. Although each company has its own quirks, Twitter has continued to make headlines for its downsizing and there are still companies that are forced to adjust their costs.
In January, Salesforce’s plans to eliminate 8,000 positions were reported and weeks ago a similar news broke about Ericsson, with the suppression of 8% of its staff. Some people warn that the scissors have not been saved in Meta either.
Don’t say crisis, say “opportunity”. That’s the maxim they seem to be applying at John Deere, the Illinois-based farm equipment giant. As detailed by Denver7, a US television network affiliated with ABC, at the end of last year the company opened a new 3,300 square meter (m2) office in downtown Chicago to attract technology employees who had recently lost their jobs. A year ago, it also opened an innovation center in Austin, a move that the firm described as “a strategic decision from the perspective of talent and collaboration.”
Has it worked for you? The channel ensures that since the opening of the Chicago office, Deere has hired 98 employees who previously worked for companies such as Uber, Google or Meta. His plans would go further and sign some 300 more people over the next two years. When it comes to attracting talent, Deere would be betting on the diversity of profiles. “It was one of our strategies to open an office in Chicago. If you have diversity of people, you have it in thought,” reflects Crystal T. Jones, director of the multinational.
Beyond the John Deere. Deere’s may be the best known, but it is certainly not an isolated case. In February Reuters pointed out how other manufacturers of agricultural machinery, in addition to Deere itself, were finding in the wave of layoffs an opportunity to access pockets of technological talent. The idea is very simple: the new scenario allows them to compete with a Silicon Valley that, until recently, attracted technicians with offers that were difficult to beat.
“They were hogging a lot of oxygen thanks to their huge budgets. They’re not hiring and firing now, which means we have a much bigger pool of potential candidates to draw on,” illustrates Scott Wine of CNH Industrial, a machinery manufacturing corporation. agricultural and heavy equipment. In 2022, it would have hired more than 350 engineers, some former employees of Amazon or Microsoft, and the company plans to invest more than 1.4 billion dollars in research and development to improve its offer.
Adapt to gain attractiveness. Another good example is left by Caterpillar Inc, one of Deere’s main competitors. Over the past year, its new hires related to fields such as machine learning or software engineering increased by 30% and by the end of 2022 it had hundreds of vacancies for technological work. “Layoffs in the community have not escaped us. We are actively talking to those employees,” they acknowledge.
Like Deere, the company has shown up at CES in Las Vegas, an opportunity both to showcase its advances and to recruit talent. With the purpose of gaining attractiveness, the manufacturers of machinery are making it easier for potential signings: new centers in Chicago or Austin, which prevent employees from having to move to Illinois, in the case of Deere; or the option of teleworking. “We will go where the talent is and that is a different strategic inclination,” remarks Johane Domersant, from the Illinois multinational.
Why this interest in technological talent? Because the activity of the manufacturers of agricultural machinery is not very similar today to the one that Deere carried out in its beginnings, in the 19th century. The multinational has opted for autonomous tractors, software development, satellite communication, autonomous sowing systems, lawnmowers and electric excavators… And it is not the only one. The sector is moving towards a horizon in which artificial intelligence or automation play a key role.
Images: John Deere
Also in Xataka: John Deere has imagined the field in 2030 and is autonomous: this is how he plans his tractors of the future
