When Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg slides into your employees’ DMs, how do you stop them from leaving?
It’s a question tech companies have wrestled with this summer as the AI talent wars reached fever pitch. And it’s not just Meta on the offensive; Google, OpenAI, Microsoft, Amazon, and others are all vying for researchers and AI whizzes capable of making the next big breakthrough. In some cases, they’re dangling life-changing sums of money to get them.
The talent wars ratcheted up another level in recent months as Meta began poaching talent for its new AI superintelligence lab, known as TBD. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said Meta is offering $100 million signing bonuses to his engineers. Microsoft has also been aggressive, making multimillion-dollar offers for the best talent, Business Insider reported.
Incumbents like Google, which have long kept employees sweet with hefty pay packets and generous equity, are suddenly facing down not just other AI-hungry giants, but more nimble startups like OpenAI and Anthropic, which are willing to fork out big bucks to secure the brightest and best.
Companies that don’t want to lose their best employees need to stay one step ahead. Talent retention experts told Business Insider exactly how they can do that.
Secret lists and special perks
As Google’s former head of talent, Laszlo Bock is all too familiar with the Silicon Valley talent wars, having participated in much of it while at the search giant.
Bock told Business Insider that the AI battle risked being a “winner-takes-all” market, which is why companies will spend so much for talent.
At Google, Bock had a bag of tricks for retaining the best employees when competitors came knocking, and he says they’re just as applicable today.
Courtesy of Humu
First, companies need to keep track of their top people and ensure they’re well looked after.
“You absolutely need to have behind the scenes a very confidential program where you’re massively overcompensating your best people,” Bock told Business Insider.
While many companies may already keep these lists, Bock said they should have a second list of the most premium talent that is most at risk — and it should be top secret.
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“You need a program where people come on and off that list. And ideally, you don’t even tell those people’s managers about it,” he said.
Money is not the only thing that talks.
“Once people have made a lot of money, their utility curve for what they value changes,” said Bock.
Perhaps an employee wants to travel more or has personal obligations like caring for a sick relative. Managers and HR should know as much as possible about their best employees so they can offer perks beyond money to keep them sweet, Bock said.
“What you want to do is have a program to understand, for every one of those people, what is most important to them and give it to them,” Bock said.
Similarly, Bock said that making employees feel like they’re focused on a mission that matters might make a few extra zeroes on an offer seem less enticing.
“The quality and impact of the work is also important,” he said. “The most technical people want to be around brilliant people and solving big problems.”
Mission statements and career progression paths
Startups that cannot compete with the mega packages of Big Tech have to think beyond remuneration.
Laura Gonzalez Florez, the chief of staff at Synthesia — the UK’s largest generative AI startup — knows firsthand how difficult it is to retain AI talent.
While the $2 billion startup offers competitive packages to new recruits, it touts “a very different value proposition to Meta,” Florez told Business Insider.
Synthesia.
While she acknowledges that the top AI talent will inevitably be driven by “cash and compensation,” many of the strongest candidates also gravitate toward a company’s vision and culture.
She added that startups can retain AI talent by giving researchers more opportunities to shape products and research and development closely. For Synthesia, it’s a case of letting AI talent know that its products can get into the hands of customers, which includes 70% of Fortune 500 companies, “very quickly,” she said. That can help attract and retain “people who want to see AI in the hands of consumers across the stack,” she added.
Companies like Synthesia should also prioritize career growth to help retain talent, Florez said.
“We need to ensure we’ve identified our talent and had transparent conversations about career growth,” she said. “We’ve noticed certain topics around personal development and career growth have really mattered.”
“That’s how any great startup should get ahead,” she added.
Mind the compensation gap
Companies also need to look inward at their compensation spread, said Kim Scott, a former tech employee who has coached CEOs and published books on workplace management.
Scott, who worked at Apple and Google, said the disparities in salaries in Big Tech companies have become a bigger problem.
“When your VPs are being paid 100 times more than your entry-level employees, you’ve got a real problem,” she said.
As such, companies need to calibrate compensation to ensure that the gap isn’t too big and doesn’t cause tensions within.
“I think it’s a really important retention strategy,” she said.
The fact that companies will fork out such high offers could itself cause internal turmoil, Scott said, as it risks only creating more of a gulf in compensation among staff. Such tensions have already played out at Meta as it tries to build its superintelligence unit, Business Insider reported.
“Let’s say you have a team of 10 people who are fantastic, and you want to hire this one other person, and you pay that person much more than the others. Now all those people hate that one person,” said Scott.
“If someone feels cheated, they’re not going to do their best work,” she added.
