Microsoft and other powerhouses have been lobbying for more immigrant visas for skilled workers from abroad, which is illustrative of one way companies are dealing with the issue at hand – finding net new talent.

When it comes to attracting talent and venture capital, Silicon Valley is by far the leader compared to other US regions (though Wall Street is challenging Sand Hill road), but the race is on from other areas around the world. This study from the Bay Area Council Economic Institute and McKinsey reveals that some other areas are emerging as real threats to the current king of the war for talent, Silicon Valley.

As we see from the graph below the cost of doing business is highest in London, followed by the Bay Area, Stockholm, and Shanghai, respectively.

In addition to high cost of doing business, the cost of living in several of these high tech areas is becoming a steep hurdle for new people when they consider relocating. For instance, in the San Francisco Bay Area the portion of income spent on housing is more than double that of the US average.

Taking all of this into account – the need to take on this war for talent on a global scale is very real right now. High tech is struggling with it more than others today, but many industries will follow.

“Think globally but act locally” is a common saying, but I’d suggest that “think globally and act globally” could be a better recipe for winning the war for talent. Get the best people to work with you (that’s right not for but with) fully aligned with your strategy irrespective of where they are located. Build your business based on talent, collaboration, and focus on real customer value creation. Collaboration and value creation have nothing to do with real estate, immigration laws, peak hour commutes, and localized flexible work arrangements. It is all about integrating the right people to produce results. The smartest companies that embrace and execute on this philosophy will win the war for talent and hence the customers’ money, based on real value creation. The best people can work with you wherever they are. Embracing this will keep you competitive. Failure to do so will be costly and troublesome. The world is spinning let’s spin along with it…

You probably don’t need me to tell you that successful companies are ones who provide products people want. But what sometimes gets lost is that this is true not just for B2C firms, but for B2B firms as well. To get a sense of what I mean, just consider the story of my current office printer. Made by a well known PC manufacturer – it is so universally despised by my colleagues for being constantly broken (as it is right now) that it will soon be replaced by a machine from another company. The moral of the story? If the end users, your ultimate customers, don’t like your product, its ultimately not going to do very well.

Recently, SuccessFactors conducted a study on how high-tech companies manage their talent. Specifically, we took a look at the core competencies such firms use to evaluate people in their organizations. Perhaps not surprisingly, we found that one very key competency stood out amongst companies that both grew faster and provided a greater return to their owners than their competition. That competency? Customer focus.

“So what?,” you might be thinking. Isn’t it fairly obvious that customer driven product development and engineering makes sense? Sure it is, but the research shows the importance of making this an explicit area for managing people. It?s not something that can be merely talked about, it has to be acted upon ? and it?s that action that makes all the difference. By way of comparison, our research also showed that customer focus is NOT something that poor-performing high tech companies stress. That is what makes this so intriguing - we’ve proven both sides of the coin.

Want to know more? Based on the results from our broad-ranging research on competencies and how they drive financial performance, we decided to partner with Bersin and Associates to get a perspective of deep expertise from the broader HCM field. Josh Bersin has analyzed our research in depth and written a great report that puts the importance of managing competencies in perspective.

For questions about the research, feel free to leave a comment, or send an email to Erik at eberggren AT successfactors.com.

A guest post by Erik Berggren – Director of Customer Results, SuccessFactors.

You probably don’t need me to tell you that successful companies are ones who provide products people want. But what sometimes gets lost is that this is true not just for B2C firms, but for B2B firms as well. To get a sense of what I mean, just consider the story of my current office printer. Made by a well known PC manufacturer – it is so universally despised by my colleagues for being constantly broken (as it is right now) that it will soon be replaced by a machine from another company. The moral of the story? If the end users, your ultimate customers, don’t like your product, its ultimately not going to do very well.

Recently, SuccessFactors conducted a study on how high-tech companies manage their talent. Specifically, we took a look at the core competencies such firms use to evaluate people in their organizations. Perhaps not surprisingly, we found that one very key competency stood out amongst companies that both grew faster and provided a greater return to their owners than their competition. That competency? Customer focus.

“So what?,” you might be thinking. Isn’t it fairly obvious that customer driven product development and engineering makes sense? Sure it is, but the research shows the importance of making this an explicit area for managing people. It’s not something that can be merely talked about, it has to be acted upon – and it’s that action that makes all the difference. By way of comparison, our research also showed that customer focus is NOT something that poor-performing high tech companies stress. That is what makes this so intriguing – we’ve proven both sides of the coin.

Want to know more? Based on the results from our broad-ranging research on competencies and how they drive financial performance, we decided to partner with Bersin and Associates to get a perspective of deep expertise from the broader HCM field. Josh Bersin has analyzed our research in depth and written a great report that puts the importance of managing competencies in perspective.

For questions about the research, feel free to leave a comment, or send an email to Erik at eberggren AT successfactors.com.

According to this NYT article, the company is exploring new methods for hiring “more well-rounded candidates, like those who have published books or started their own clubs.”  They will now be asking the 100,000 job applicants each month to fill out an “elaborate online survey that explores their attitudes, behavior, personality and biographical details going back to high school.”

The company then takes the surveys and compares them against some 25 different measures of employee performance. By doing so, they hope to expose the traits that make for successful employees so they can more readily find the gems amongst the thousands of applications they get each day.

I just think they are just right on with this. As I recently posted on Dave Lefkow’s blog:  ”When performance is the heart of the effort, you can come to a recruiting system from a new perspective. Instead of focusing only on traditional recruiting metrics like time to hire – you can start to think about and track the actual performance of each new hire over time. Then, you can identify what makes for higher performing candidates and build that knowledge into a system that helps you source and hire more like them.”

Interestingly, Dave wondered “…if the market is ready for this – right now, recruiters are measured on efficiency, not effectiveness. It’s all about getting bodies in seats, and introducing a measure of quality that recruiters are tied to would require a big mindset shift. I can hear the groans now – but I don’t make the decisions about who to hire. That’s the hiring manager. Buck passed.”

Google is no representation of the market at large. But as a pioneer in many ways, they often pick up on trends before others. Perhaps their talent approaches are equally visionary.

The blog discussion is also pretty interesting. Some people think money rules, but others see real value in letting employees explore. I wonder if such tactics are purely in the domain of the high-tech world, or if there’s applicability beyond technology. Could you see something like this at Pfizer or Ford?