For tech industry recruiters, the gravitational pull of Silicon Valley is experiencing interference from cities more traditionally associated with the Mormon Church, a Will Smith party anthem, iconic American cars, and other things that have nothing to do with Mark Zuckerberg, according to a new report.

The Tech Hiring Report from Datapeople, a maker of people-analytics software, indicates that tech-industry job listings are spreading out far from the industry’s historic epicenter of the Bay Area and into other markets such as Salt Lake City, Miami, Detroit, Chicago, and Austin.

The diaspora, combined with the widespread normalization of remote work due to the pandemic, has tech recruiters navigating a new economic and geographic landscape. Remote candidates are now commanding Silicon Valley-level salaries as they work hundreds, if not thousands, of miles away from the sleek corporate campuses of Facebook and Google, Paul Wallenberg, senior director of technology services at the recruiting and staffing firm LaSalle Network, told HR Brew.

“The thing that’s made [recruiting] a bit more difficult is the level of salary inflation that’s crept into the non-Valley” markets, he said. “What we’re seeing is basically a 40% premium when comparing current ranges against pre-Covid salaries [for tech workers].”

With the tech industry spreading out farther than ever, recruiters are facing new challenges that necessitate creative thinking, as remote applicants, in addition to those interviewing for jobs based in-person in smaller markets, ask for the salaries commanded by their counterparts residing in Silicon Valley, Tejal Wagadia, a recruiter for a major cloud computing company, told HR Brew.

“There have been conversations around compensation where the candidates expected to be paid the same if they were located in Silicon Valley,” Wagadia said—except the jobs were for remote candidates in areas with a lower cost of living.

Where have all the tech jobs gone? Keep reading here.—SB

Do you work in HR or have information about your HR department we should know? Email [email protected] or DM @SammBlum on Twitter. For completely confidential conversations, ask Sam for his number on Signal.

Welcome to our regular HR advice column, Ask a Resourceful Human. Here to answer all of your burning questions is Erin Grau, the co-founder and chief operating officer at Charter, a media and services company that aims to transform the workplace. Erin has over 15 years of experience at the intersection of talent and operations in global organizations and startups, including The New York Times and Away. You can sign up for the free Charter newsletter about the future of work here.

Our very first question concerns something that’s on many workers’ minds: inflation and the cost of living. Got a question about HR? Let us know at [email protected]. (Anonymity is assured.)

Employees expect a higher cost-of-living adjustment [COLA] given the > 7% inflation rate jump, but we haven’t budgeted for that. How do I think about inflation this year and its impact on salaries?

Compensation is incredibly complicated right now, thanks not only to a 7.9% inflation-rate jump (a 40-year high), but also a long and intense nationwide quitting streak and a tight labor market.

Before I get into practical advice, it’s important to address a long-held, little-discussed issue with the way companies manage employees: They’re used to doing the minimum they need to do to hire and retain people. Before the pandemic, it kinda worked (for employers).

But these days, employees are looking for greater transparency and higher pay, and the tight labor market heightens the chances they can job-hop to get paid more elsewhere. Some 56% of US workers who quit their jobs last year say they’re now earning more money with their new employer. Organizations that rely on their workforce to compete must take note and change their approach, or they’ll be left behind.

With that in mind, I think there are two main things you can do for your employees right now: help offset the increased cost of living for your employees, and communicate with greater transparency.

It makes sense that employees expect that if their costs are going up, their paycheck is going up, too. If you are a wildly profitable company, it’s easy for you to take some of that profit and push it back to employees, maybe even increasing their salaries by 8% across the board.

For most companies, however, it’s not a viable option to increase salaries by 8% and take that additional 8% cost into the future, so those companies will need to look for opportunities to support employees through high inflation. Keep reading here.—EG

It’s been more than two years since the WHO declared the Covid-19 outbreak a global pandemic, and we’re still living in the throes of the Great Something-or-other.

The pandemic turned the labor market upside down; a record number of workers quit their jobs in 2021 in what quickly became known as the Great Resignation—a term often credited to Texas A&M’s Anthony Klotz. But those swept up in the mass exodus weren’t merely slipping into the void to drink bellinis and sunbathe while the rest of the country toiled. As Klotz told me in January: “Resignation does not mean that people are quitting and leaving the workforce; it just means they’re quitting.” (Glancing at Bureau of Labor Statistics data would show that, overall, workers who quit were indeed searching for and finding other jobs.)

Nonetheless, the term spawned a series of lesser beasts in its wake, many of which wormed their way into my inbox over the last several months as publicists and pundits sought to outdo themselves with the next “great” catchphrase. PR pitches warning about the “Great Disconnect,” the “Great Burnout,” the “Hidden Resignation,” the “Great Retention,” and the “Great Career Revitalization” all seemed to be part of this trend to boil down a sprawling and endlessly complicated event into a simplistic moniker to help promote their clients.

Surprise! It didn’t work.

The “Great Take Machine” is more like it. Keep reading here.—SB

Do you work in HR or have information about your HR department we should know? Email [email protected] or DM @SammBlum on Twitter. For completely confidential conversations, ask Sam for his number on Signal.

Today’s top HR reads.

Stat: According to an anonymous professional social network popular in the tech industry, 80% of tech workers in California are considering looking for a different job, and over 50% have applied for a new job in the past month. (Blind survey, via Human Resources Director)

Quote: “Going back into work now feels really difficult. All those fears I had, everything that was holding me back about transitioning, it doesn’t make sense anymore. I didn’t know I could be happy like this.”—Rae Lee, a teacher who is transgender, explaining to the New York Times that working from home during the pandemic gave her the freedom to take the next steps in her transition

Read: How to get better at recognizing and remembering your coworkers. (BBC Worklife)

Do better than basic. Some companies offer pizza parties and vague “wellness” programs, but you’re focused on the benefits employees can actually use—like Student Loan Management by Betterment at Work. Learn more here.*

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Catch up on the top HR Brew stories from the recent past:

• How the Defense Department’s AI center recruits top tech talent without top salary offers
• Making your workplace inclusive for the disabled starts with job listings
• As workers enter the metaverse, how much privacy will they surrender at the virtual door?