Microsoft Corp (MSFT) plans to an unprecedented pay raises and stock awards to attract and retain top talent. Every new dollar earned by each of the 40,000 employees who live in the region will generate another dollar in car sales, restaurant meals, sales of flat-screen televisions and maybe even housing sales. It faces fierce competition for workers from more established publicly-owned companies such as Google (GOOG), Salesforce.com Inc. (CRM) and VMware Inc (VMW).
That war has turned technology workers – and new graduates – into coveted commodities in Silicon Valley, which is seeing its biggest recruitment drive since the dot.com bubble of the early 2000s. Microsoft, Facebook and Google are all aggressively recruiting college students in an attempt to hire them before they graduate.
Ballmer said the company is making this investment to attract and retain employees, who might otherwise be lured away by tech companies such as Google and Facebook. “The changes we're rolling out today will help ensure Microsoft continues to be the place that top talent comes to change the world,” he wrote.
Microsoft plans, among other things, “important” compensation increases for divisions with fast-moving markets, including research and development and certain geographies.
Microsoft employs about 40,000 people in Western Washington. The e-mail didn't reveal how much the increases would be worth, but a University of Washington study suggested that even a 5 percent increase across the board would pump more than $300 million into the state's economy.
Chief executive Steve Ballmer announced the changes in an e-mail. All nearly 90,000 employees worldwide will see more cash upfront as compensation is shifted from stock awards. About 80 percent will receive 100 percent of their bonus and stock awards, up from half previously. Senior leaders have a large part of their compensation tied to shares.
Lee Pender Wrote, Why, you might ask, should that matter to you, the partner? Well, as we've written in this space before, and as readers have told us many times over the years, Microsoft is not the destination company it used to be. The phrase that's floating around now is that Microsoft is a place to have worked rather than a place to be. The company's recent and ongoing execudus seems to support that line of thinking.
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