What GICs Can Learn From Startups To Compete For Tech Talent

GICs (Global Innovation Centers) often face tough competition from startups regarding attracting and retaining top talent in the tech space. Startups are often perceived as more agile, innovative and exciting, while GICs may be seen as more bureaucratic and risk-averse. However, GICs can leverage several advantages to compete with startups and attract top talent.

First, GICs need to highlight the benefits and perks they offer employees, such as stability, strong company culture and opportunities for career advancement. By emphasizing the unique value they offer employees, GICs can differentiate themselves from startups and attract top talent.

But can they do more? Could they maybe emulate certain aspects of startup culture that most attract the top talent and thus offer a "best-of-both-worlds" workplace? Read on to find out.

Advantages Of GICs Over Startups

One advantage that GICs have is their association with large organizations, which offers stability and security. While startups may be more exciting and offer the potential for rapid growth and big rewards, they also come with higher risk and uncertainty. GICs, on the other hand, can be attractive to employees looking for long-term career growth. Another advantage GICs have is the resources and expertise they have to offer a range of professional development and training opportunities, which can help employees build new skills and advance their careers.

GICs also tend to have more structure and more defined processes and job descriptions, which leads to more consistency in operations, better-managed change and more structured rewards and recognition programs. On a more personal level, I find that GICs often offer better recreational facilities as well as access to counseling and mentoring, meaning that work-life balance may be easier to maintain. Finally, GICs are often a part of very reputable global organizations, which adds prestige to any employee’s résumé.

Now that we’ve listed some of the advantages GICs should emphasize when competing for talent, let’s see how GICs can emulate startups to offer some of the same excitement and agility in the workplace that often attracts top talent to startups.

What Can GICs Learn From Startups?

1. Remove some of the bureaucracy

One central point of criticism toward more prominent legacy companies is the amount of red tape, which slows processes down and can effectively halt innovation and creativity. If you want to compete for top talent as a GIC, try to give more ownership to your department heads, cut down on bureaucratic processes and consider introducing something like Google’s 20% rule, which gives employees time to work on whatever they are passionate about. Much innovation arises from this kind of freedom.

2. Become more fun

What makes startups so much fun is the informal work environment, the pace at which work is done, the spontaneity and the culture that encourages team members to be friends and have fun outside of their work responsibilities. It can be easy to import some of that into your GIC environment: Encourage people to create non-work-related Slack channels to discuss their hobbies and interests, trust people more and control them less, and host fun events like hackathons and fascinating talks by top authors and celebrities.

3. Allow for more exciting roles

Multinational corporations often have very narrowly defined roles that can make more creative spirits feel trapped in a job description that gives them little opportunity for creativity. Consider being more flexible with job descriptions and encouraging employees to weigh in on what they would like their role to be. That way, you will have more engaged employees and better results as they work on things they genuinely care about.

4. Offer more opportunities for growth

A GIC definitely has an advantage over a startup regarding long-term career prospects and succession planning. However, in the short term, the opportunities at a startup are more exciting. In a startup, someone who comes in as a software engineer could rise to CTO within three or four years.

What opportunities for growth could you offer to those who are ready to take on more responsibility? How could you make their mid-term prospects more exciting? This is an important consideration, as the average tenure at any one organization is getting shorter, and the younger talent often advances their career by changing organizations every three to five years. If you only offer long-term opportunities, you might lose out on some of the top talent.

5. Create a startup-like environment in capsules

Could you have an innovation center—a kind of Skunk Works, where the atmosphere is more startup-like, as it often is in R&D departments? Could you create a part of your GIC that allows more flexibility, creativity and playfulness to enter the workplace?

Offer The Best Of Both Worlds

As there is increasing competition for top talent in the tech space, companies looking to recruit the best and brightest must set themselves apart to become attractive. GICs would do well to redefine their employee value proposition (EVP) by focusing on providing a flexible or hybrid working model and offering a range of other benefits to attract top talent.

The best way to do that is to offer candidates the best of both worlds: the excitement, pace, innovation and creative challenge of a startup environment combined with the stability, reputation and long-term opportunities of a GIC.

First published on Forbes.com in June 2023