Talent crunch: New York startups start offering $5,000 bonus to new hires

With big dogs like Facebook and Twitter building out their engineering offices in Manhattan, the little guys have to up their recruiting game. A band of seven Silicon Alley startups has come together to form Come Work In New York, an organization hoping to entice top tech talent to stay scrappy in the Big Apple. From its presser:

Dispatch, makers of a soon-to-launch cloud collaboration service, has partnered with Yipit, Aviary, Loosecubes, Ordr.in, ChatID, and Tutorspree to create Come Work in New York, a campaign to invite talented people from across the country to be part of the technical revolution that’s happening in New York right now. To that end, each startup is offering a $5,000 bonus plus relocation help to attract great talent to come join their teams. The companies are looking for talented developers, designers and problem solvers eager to move to New York, a city that is quickly emerging as one of the top startup hubs in the nation.

Most of the teams participating in Come Work in New York are less than 10 people, so new hires can have a big impact on shaping the future of each company. Each team is tackling tough problems as well. Yipit deals with huge amounts of new data each day. Aviary processed more than 10 million photos in January alone. ChatID is one of the leading contributors to XMPP, the technology that powers chat for Facebook and Google.

Personally we’re a proponent of the get ’em young, keep ’em loyal approach. Why spend big bucks on expertise when the new Academy for Software Engineering is going to be cranking out its first class starting this September?

Image via Flickr user Blacren