Techdom's Talent Poaching Epidemic

Over the past seven months, executives at Zynga, the popular social gaming company, plotted how to recruit Neil Roseman, an engineer who had led Amazon.com's (AMZN) launch of its digital music business and development of the Kindle e-book reader's software. Instead of hiring a search consultant, Zynga relied on a former Amazon manager who had worked under Roseman to make the first contact. Then Chief Executive Officer Mark Pincus invited him for a one-on-one in his San Francisco office. Pincus told Roseman how much he wanted him to lead a team of engineers and assured him he wouldn't have to leave his home near Seattle. Roseman started working at Zynga as a vice-president last month. "I thought Mark was a guy I could hang out with, and I wanted to realize the future this company has," says Roseman, who'd turned down several offers from other technology companies in recent months.

As the economy rebounds, tech companies are battling over engineers, designers, computer scientists, and executives who can stay ahead of rapid change in the industry. Those workers are being courted with everything from coffee with the CEO to lots of cold cash. The competition for talent is especially fierce among social media and other Internet companies as well as computer systems manufacturers. Facebook's expansion "has outpaced our head count growth," says Lori Goler, the company's vice-president of people. "We're hiring to keep pace." Some companies are even staging repeated raids on rivals' stars. Juniper Networks (JNPR) has snatched three executives from Cisco Systems (CSCO) in the last year.