Jumping Jacks: Hiring in 2021

A year of endless pain for HRs and endless gain for tech talent

2021. What a year. 

The year when young guns attended their 4th (or 7th) company orientation…only to end up attending a new one later that week because they got a better offer. 

These hyper-talented youngsters have been switching companies so fast, sometimes they can't remember which company they’re working for at a given moment in time. They’re actually lasting longer in bed than in jobs….a grim situation for their life partners as well as HR partners. 

The great resignation is real. Managers are getting so many resignation mails every day that one of them actually tried to find the unsubscribe button. Background verification companies are on track towards quadrillion dollar valuations, on the back of assignments to verify the same candidate for the 15th time in a year. The candidate, meanwhile, is planning to buy beachfront property on Mars right after receiving his FNF from the first job (to use as a downpayment with BNPL companies who’re happy to sponsor these extraterrestrial property deals). 

Tech founders are shouting themselves hoarse about this talent scarcity as investors ask what the hell they're doing with the dry powder if not hiring talent at 17x their previous CTC. Meanwhile, HR heads are trying to clone themselves so they can chat with 15 developers at the same time. They hope at least one of them would convert because he has only 4 other offers that are not as lucrative because they don’t include a brand new chopper with 3 years worth of free petroleum. 

ESOPs are being thrown around with maddening intensity, unaccepted offer letters are resulting in rampant deforestation, and employees are getting hefty 2-day retention bonuses (after which they abscond). The lines between companies are fading as employees hustle in and out of them, creating real confusion and a crisis of personal identity for these businesses. An even messier event would be a corporate acquiring a startup, employees leaving and running in more directions than are temporally possible, and the M&A head realizing he just bought an empty company- the kind of feeling you get when you pay an eye-popping 20 bucks for a bag of air (and some chips that can be found with a positron-emission microscope). 

These are the best of times, the worst of times. Best for the ones playing trampoline and being courted by armies of HR professionals, worst for everyone suffering from the exodus…and the jealous co-workers who find it hard to negotiate even a third the raise these high-demand folks get, leave alone the Hayabusa bonuses.  

Meanwhile, there are a bunch of brand-new tech startups that use advanced desperation-detection algorithms to help these whiz kids fish out the most burnt-out tech HRs on LinkedIn, auto-apply at their firm, and even use some GPT-5 chops to get the machine to negotiate a 200% hike on their behalf. It totally makes sense to outsource this mundane, repeatable task to a SaaS product, when you could use the same time investing your newfound gains in trading Shiba Inu futures. However, not all’s well with these hiring-enablement startups, as rumors abound of how their own developers are using the product to move out of the startup, leaving the founders high and dry. 

Such is the state of affairs as the war on tech talent is turning nuclear. Jumping jacks is no longer an exercise- it’s a way of life. The only way out of this quandary is a grassroots solution, something like a Jan-Dhan-Python Yojana to ensure every human gets access to coding skills in this country.