Chicago Announces Ambitious, New Talent And Recruitment Goal To Build A Diverse, Tech-Ready Workforce
P33 in partnership with World Business Chicago and local tech employers’ kick-off the ‘Come Back to Move Forward’ campaign to recruit and retain 10,000 diverse tech professionals over the next two years
P33, a nonprofit focused on making Chicagoland one of the best places to work in tech, announces the Come Back to Move Forward campaign to attract top-tier tech talent with ties to the Midwest back to the Chicago area. This first of a kind initiative, which is live today at gotechchicago.com connects mid-career, cream-of-the-crop tech talent by providing visibility and access to high caliber networking and lucrative job opportunities at Chicago’s most innovative startups and corporations.
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The North American tech talent market is 6.3 million people. Out of the 6.3 million, the campaign is targeting an estimated 100,000 tech professionals with previous ties to the Chicagoland area. This campaign initially intends to reach over 15,000 tech professionals over the next few months and is expected to scale further later in the year.
“I’m very proud to see how our entire ecosystem of world-class universities, corporations, startups and business incubators are coming together to create real, sustainable change,” noted Michael Fassnacht, President and Chief Executive Officer for World Business Chicago & CMO, City of Chicago. “We’re building a workforce that’s true to our DNA as a city – we don’t make small plans; we’re committed to growing our tech economy and changing the world.”
Over the past 6 months, P33 has galvanized, a coalition of 50 employers including corporations and startups, 3 leading educational institutions, 6 startup incubators, in addition to dozens of influential tech leaders who have come on board to participate. Participating companies include established tech giants like Google and Microsoft, Chicago’s Fortune 500 companies such as Allstate and Motorola as well as emerging tech companies such as Amount, M1 Finance, Oak Street Health.
The campaign is one of several initiatives underway to spur the region’s ability to recruit and retain 10,000 tech professionals over the next two years.
“Chicago has an incredible depth of opportunities and some of the most dynamic and fast-growing startups in the country,” noted Brad Henderson, Chief Executive Officer for P33. “Together we are tackling problems that matter and are hiring in droves to scale. We are building the most diverse ecosystem in the country.”
The Come Back to Move Forward campaign is part of a larger strategy to reshape traditional talent recruitment efforts into a business-driven, scalable model that can directly address long-standing challenges to developing a diverse, tech-ready workforce. This new model breaks away from traditional approaches that typically overburden educational institutions, start talent development too late, overlook the challenges of DEI, and are deployed on a small, fragmented scale. Instead, the new model for attracting and retaining talent is employer-driven, reaches into the talent development pipeline much earlier, and embeds an intentional corporate commitment to DEI, and is designed to scale.
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The Come Back to Move Forward campaign is a first step in establishing a unique, Chicago-affiliated network made up of top-tier tech professionals working anywhere in the US and across the globe. This campaign is targeting mid-career tech professionals who either have roots in the Midwest or attended school in Illinois. Specifically, the campaign is focused on talent with the most in-demand tech skills needed by local employers in the fields of data, software, cloud, AI and engineering.
To help entice people back, tech professionals who provide their email and LinkedIn profile can plug into Chicago’s tech scene and receive personalized, concierge service and connect to Chicago employers looking to hire. Additionally, a select number of tech professionals who signup is eligible to win a Welcome Backpack featuring Lollapalooza tickets, Airbnb experiences, and passes to The Forge and other Chicagoland experiences. The full list of participating companies and perks can be found at gotechchicago.com. A digital ad campaign will run in a select number of markets including, San Francisco, New York, Seattle, Los Angeles, Boston, Atlanta, Denver, Austin, Dallas and Washington, DC.
“Part of this effort is about closing the gap between misperception and reality,” commented Kristi Ross, co-founder and co-CEO of Chicago-based tastytrade, who is one of the rare female co-founders to reach a $1 billion dollar exit. “Even with the Covid lockdown, we’ve continued to grow. We currently have more than 35,000 tech jobs in data, engineering, cloud and software development, and we’re actively building the most inclusive tech ecosystem in the U.S.”
Chicago is one of the best cities in the U.S. for female founders and has the highest concentration of women-owned startups in the world – at 34%. In February, in partnership with Verizon and 1871, the #1 university Chicago-based incubator in the world, P33 announced TechRise, one of the largest non-dilutive grant funds for early-stage Black and Latinx tech founders.
Unlike other regions, in Chicago no one industry makes up more than 13% of its GDP. Chicago’s growing tech economy includes a powerful mix of B2B and B2C companies and startups in agriculture, healthcare, logistics, food, insurance, and includes the advancement of early- stage technologies like quantum information science – estimated to be one of the most influential tech advancements of the decade.
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