After a sluggish start to 2018, hiring has accelerated recently at the top software companies in three of America’s largest technology hubs.
That’s according to the latest quarterly Digital Jobs Index compiled by John Barrett, a Boston-area partner with executive recruiting firm On Partners. The report tracks job growth at 100 leading software and Internet companies in Boston, New York, and the San Francisco Bay Area.
During the three-month period that ended June 30, the Bay Area companies added 7,495 net new jobs, an increase of 3.5 percent in the total number of tech employees tracked in the previous quarter, according to the second-quarter report. Hiring surged 4.2 percent in New York during the second quarter, as the companies tracked by the survey added 3,015 net new jobs. Boston saw growth of 3 percent compared with the first quarter of the year, as local tech employers increased their headcounts by 1,830 people.
All three markets enjoyed more growth than in the first quarter. During that period, Bay Area and New York tech headcounts increased by about 2 percent compared with the last quarter of 2017, while Boston’s headcount grew only 1 percent during the first quarter, according to the report.
Another encouraging sign: more than 70 percent of the 100 companies tracked in each of the three geographies increased their employee count during the second quarter, an indication that the job gains aren’t concentrated in a small number of companies.
“Hiring activity certainly hit on all cylinders in the second quarter, and we don’t see any slowdown in the short term,” Barrett said in a prepared statement. “What’s most encouraging is that job growth is happening at an increasing number of companies, and the strong tech economy seems to be benefitting most employers.”
Barrett tracks data from a variety of software and Internet companies, primarily the largest tech employers in each metropolitan area, although he said he makes some exceptions to include smaller venture-backed companies that are growing fast and having an impact on the local tech community. His statistics are gathered by searching LinkedIn for the number of locally based employees working for those tech companies. That means the data are not comprehensive—some employees might not update their LinkedIn profiles in a timely fashion, or might not even have one. But Barrett claims his data are usually within 5 percent of official hiring numbers.
The current hiring uptick follows several years of fluctuating growth, at least in Boston and New York. (Barrett didn’t start monitoring Bay Area hiring for the report until this year, and he didn’t conduct the study at all last year.)
Barrett said several factors could be driving the current pickup in hiring, including “strong GDP growth, an increase in corporate IT spending, continued high levels of VC investment, and a stronger IPO market.”
“All major drivers of job creation seem to be peaking at the same time,” Barrett said in an e-mail to Xconomy. “In my estimation, this could indicate we’re at or near a [hiring] peak. There’s no telling if this will continue, but anecdotally, we haven’t seen a slowdown so far” in third-quarter hiring.
One interesting takeaway from the latest report is that the hiring in Boston and the Bay Area is being driven largely by locally based tech companies, while much of the job growth in New York is from businesses headquartered elsewhere. Below are the tech companies that hired the most people in each metro area during the second quarter of 2018. The numbers represent net new jobs at each firm.
Bay Area:
1. Google: 1,609
2. Apple: 1,356
3. Facebook: 712
4. Salesforce: 379
5. Uber: 353
6. Amazon: 271
7. Workday: 215
8. Lyft: 186
9. Splunk: 166
10. Square: 160
New York:
1. Amazon: 511
2. Google: 407
3. Compass: 239
4. WeWork: 226
5. Facebook: 130
6. Uber: 109
7. PayPal: 97
8. Spotify: 88
9. Microsoft: 70
10. Yelp: 61
Boston:
1. Wayfair: 472
2. Amazon: 217
3. HubSpot: 144
4. IBM: 100
5. Google: 88
6. TripAdvisor: 54
7. DraftKings: 49
8. Microsoft: 49
9. Kronos: 48
10. CarGurus: 47
