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In Silicon Valley, a Computer Talent Hunt by Air and Internet

PALO ALTO, Calif.—Like the Washington area, California's Silicon Valley faces a shortage of technology workers, forcing fast-growing companies here to think up a surplus of creative ways to recruit them.

Billboards, some of which scream "Work for Us," dot the region's highways. Employers make their pitches on almost every radio station and before the previews at movie theaters. Hawaiian vacations are given to employees who lure their friends away from competitors.

But now it appears that not even the sky is the limit.

At the annual football matchup between Stanford University and the University of California at Berkeley earlier this month, three large technology companies copied a promotional strategy long used by local car dealers and plumbers: They hired biplanes to buzz the stadium toting banners advertising jobs.

One of them, Bay Networks Inc., which makes computer networking devices, urged the more than 80,000 fans to "Score a Job" by visiting the company's World Wide Web site.

"Finding talent in the Valley is so tough that you've got to do something different to get noticed," said David L. House, Bay Networks' chief executive. Despite such stunts, Bay, like many other large technology firms in this area, still has "hundreds of unfilled jobs," he said.

The tech-worker shortage is "a major national problem," said Harris Miller, president of the Information Technology Association of America, an Arlington-based trade group. It's also showing up in tech centers such as Austin, Seattle, Denver and Raleigh-Durham, N.C. His group has assembled a task force with the U.S. Commerce and Education departments to propose solutions.

The ITAA estimates there are at least 190,000 vacant jobs in the information technology industry today. For Silicon Valley, projections of the shortage's severity vary, but several experts and studies have pegged the figure at more than 50,000 jobs.

In the communities a few miles north and south of here, the worker deficit has been affecting some of the tech industry's biggest names -- Intel Corp., Cisco Systems Inc., Netscape Communications Corp. and Oracle Corp., to name a few -- as well as a whole generation of fledgling start-ups trying to become the next household name.

At Cisco, which makes the hardware that runs much of the Internet, there are 400 unfilled positions, said Barbara Beck, the company's vice president of human resources.

One of Cisco's recent recruitment tactics: targeting visitors to its Web site who are coming from a competitor's computer system (monitoring equipment can make such a determination). "If we saw someone coming from one of our rivals, instead of showing them the page that said 'Welcome to Cisco' and listed our products, we routed them to another site that said, 'Welcome to Cisco, would you like a job?' " Beck said. "If someone was aggressive enough to try to check up on their competitor, we figured we could use that person."

Cisco and other large companies here have been recruiting heavily outside the area, using the Valley's comfortable climate and proximity to San Francisco as selling points. Competitors from outside Northern California, however, frequently mention the area's high housing prices and seemingly perpetual traffic congestion.

Netcentives Inc. of San Francisco uses a recruitment tactic found at many smaller companies -- giving new stock to new employees, whose shares could be worth millions if the firm becomes publicly traded. The tiny start-up, which has developed technology to reward Internet shoppers with frequent-flier miles, also pitches itself as a more exciting place to work than an established company.

Using options, the lure of stimulating work and at least 100,000 frequent-flier miles as a signing bonus, Netcentives' chief executive, West Shell III, has expanded his company from 15 people in July to 40 today, but he still has five vacancies for software engineers. Those unfilled jobs have forced the company to slow down the deployment of its software, he said.

And while Shell is out trying to entice new employees, headhunters are after the ones he already has bagged. "I'm getting people coming into my office and saying, 'Geez, I just turned down a $200,000 offer,' " he said. "That won't last for long. I know for a fact my people are going to get stolen soon."