With the pandemic end in the vicinity and optimism worldwide for continued digital growth, 2021 will be a war for Digital talent. Also, visa candidates rules are being revised.  H1B applicants will need to be earning a salary equivalent to the 45th percentile of their profession’s salary if they’re an entry-level worker, rising to the 95th percentile for higher-skilled workers. In the past, the boundaries were set at the 17th and 67th percentiles, respectively.

Please take a look at the pay data from Netflix (they pay really well, so they are not a typical benchmark, but you will get a sense of where the market is trending for some of these positions )

The positions included in the San Francisco Bay Area

• Product designer: $325,500 median; ranging from $325,000 to $500,000
• Senior data scientist: $412,500 median; ranging from $360,000 to $500,000
• Senior data engineer: $425,000 median; ranging from $390,000 to $550,000
• Senior software engineer: $430,000 median; ranging from $154,669 to $620,000
• Senior UI engineer: $467,500 median; ranging from $250,000 to $500,000

As you could see, the war for the right talent is real and getting heated up.  This will further accelerate in 2021.

Many compensation surveys need to be carefully studied, and boundary conditions need to be understood.  To absolutely get this right, we have to understand the non-basic pay.  We are also building many connectors to new financial statements and other similar sources to understand what companies are paying for the various non-basic components.

Let us know if we can do any targeted analysis on this topic

We believe that each recruiter should understand the peers from where they are hiring through the digital lens.  Once a recruiter understands this, the ability to target a subset of peers increases (the precision with which one can target).  Here is a sample table of Digital initiatives.  Collecting these and maintaining a library of digital intentions will help you map similar talent across enterprises.

Such mapping will help you understand the Niche skill and the Conventional skills.  For example, if you are hiring a tech team for, say, Fraud management in a bank, you should have a library of companies to target who is excelling in that work and lead in that digital initiative.

In 2021, Job descriptions will be a sum of various Digital Intentions and Initiatives.  Please take a look at the Apple mapping of their Designer talent.  There are three versions of Design talent that Apple goes after for Design (one focused on traditional design skills, one centered more around Human Factor Design (highly experimental), and one focused more on integrating different systems as in Apple Pay.  So there are three distinct populations of designers within Apple Product Designers.  If a Recruiter understands this dynamic, one can be extremely successful.