
'The-next-YouTube' employees, listen up...
By Tim Ferguson
Published: 13 November 2007 16:55 GMT
The majority of people looking to work for web 2.0 start-up companies are prepared to sacrifice pay in exchange for shares in the venture they're joining.
More than 75 per cent of candidates joining dot-com start-ups through IT staffing company ReThink Recruitment have foregone up to a third of their salary in exchange for shares.
Two years ago just 10 per cent of workers did the same but the level is now close to that seen during the first dot-com boom.
Agenda Setters 2007 - Top 20
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1. Mark Zuckerberg
2. Steve Jobs
3. Eric Schmidt
4. John Chambers
5. Ashley Highfield
6. Nicholas Negroponte
7. Niklas Zennström
8. Diane Greene
9. Jonathan Ive
10.Viviane Reding
11.Paul Coby
12.Marc Benioff
13.Emily Bell
14.Larry Ellison
15.Jeff Bezos
16.Ben Verwaayen
17.Nandan Nilekani
18.David Yu
19.Satoru Iwata
20.Mark Hurd
And companies are catching on, with many offering shares and options to induce contract workers to become permanent employees.
This goes against the trend in other parts of the IT industry where an increasing proportion of people are now looking to go freelance.
An example given is someone moving from a £72,000 salary as a contractor in a start-up, to a £50,000 wage with £20,000 in options to become a permanent member of staff.
Nathan Callaghan of ReThink said start-ups have always offered equity to secure top talent but this lost currency following the dot-com crash.
Callaghan said this is now changing following major acquisitions of web 2.0 start-ups such as Google buying YouTube in 2006 and MySpace being acquired by News International in 2005.
Equity offers are also a useful way of combating a skills shortage in web technology and they help to stop talent walking away at the end of a contract, he added.
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Agenda Setters 2009
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