The facts of the ever-widening tech labor shortage are increasingly difficult to ignore: As many as 9 million tech jobs sit vacant across the United States, Europe, and China, says Przemyslaw Berendt (PLDA 18, 2014). And judging by the $1 trillion spent on IT services in 2018, and the direction of global tech trends, the shortage isn’t going away quickly. Berendt cofounded Talent Alpha in 2018 to fill that gap. The Kraków-based startup is building a marketplace to link central and eastern Europe’s software houses with global enterprises in search of talent—connections that are further refined by an AI engine that ensures an optimal fit of both technical and soft skills.

Berendt came to Talent Alpha after 18 years in the tech industry, most recently at the global IT service provider Luxoft. There he observed that the 25,000 small IT companies in central and eastern Europe, each employing five to 500 software engineers, are often locked out of larger enterprise deals. What’s more, their target clients and projects are relatively small, which means valuable resources are left on the table. “That’s 700,000 software engineers, and anywhere between 20 and 30 percent of the headcount is not optimized for utilization,” Berendt says. “About 200,000 people are sitting idle. We want to take this wealth of talent and connect it to Fortune 5000 companies.”

These talent-as-a-service offerings will allow global companies to build a virtual team of prequalified engineers on demand, “in the same way that you would hail an Uber ride,” Berendt says. Software houses across Europe will be able to grow their sales pipeline, access new markets, and create economic opportunities locally.

With $5 million in seed funding, Talent Alpha is building the platform, signing partnerships with software houses (70 and counting), and creating a digital fingerprint for each engineer—incorporating a mix of professional competencies and a person’s psychometric profile. Meanwhile, they are debating the chicken-and-egg conundrum of growth: whether to build the supply of talent to attract clients first, or vice versa. Building the supply side has been straightforward, but convincing enterprise clients to leverage talent as a service as part of their strategy has been more challenging, Berendt says. What can Talent Alpha do to catalyze this process and convince companies to consider the human cloud?

Seems like a good mix of broad PR and market education, together with high-value customer selling, will be required. The incubators and startup competitions are likely to welcome your disruptive business concept. What about getting these organizations to pay for the service at full price or a discount and then provide it to the winning startups as an in-kind prize or investment? Assuming this activity will generate a significant amount of publicity, and as startups graduate (or people from these startups join larger firms), the awareness will permeate the ecosystem.
—Boris Tsimerinov (PLDA 16, 2017)

you have signed up suppliers, but quality over quantity is mandatory, and the best ones are often the hardest. Do the suppliers have the structure and resources in place to pursue enterprise solutions? And what is the role of your suppliers’ resources? End users are paranoid about being left with customized code that they are highly dependent upon and no one to turn to if that supplier somehow disappears or goes out of business. Credibility is imperative here. As you target specific markets and applications, go wide and thin versus focused and deep. Also, few enterprises want to be on the bleeding edge. Even in high tech, Microsoft was a second mover.
—Kerry Bensman (ISMP 90, 1990)

I agree with establishing the cloud of developers first. However, I think the demand side will be interested only when potential consumers can be assured of the quality and effectiveness of the resources they are procuring. It appears you plan to have a measurable way to assess the technical and soft skills of the resources: Consumers will want to know what the yardsticks are and how that measures up in the industry. Finally, software can be a breeding ground for security vulnerabilities, and unfortunately, there are developers drawn to the “opportunities” of the dark markets. What, if any, assurance does a consumer have regarding the motivations and potential uses of their resources and their solutions?
—Sherry Garvin (AMP 190, 2016)

The biggest hurdle is the not-invented-here syndrome: The head of development or the VP of IT always thinks he/she can do it better, and no one wants to see a reduction in their own empire. Ultimately, cost, turnaround time, and quality will prevail, but you have to prove you can check all three boxes. And you have to sell to the CEO, CFO, and CIO, as opposed to the VP of development or QA. The VPs have too much turf to protect.
—Robert Finzi (MBA 1983)

The real crux of the issue is managing those developers. If a client takes on 25 Java programmers, how are they managed? Not by Talent Alpha, which appears to act as an agency. Therefore the client has to have a decent process to manage remote programmers, bring them into project teams, and test and integrate their code. Perhaps the early contracts will put the developers on the client’s site to short-circuit these issues? At a minimum the Talent Alpha sales process has to identify clients that have robust project management processes to accommodate developers from the human cloud. Strong qualifications along these lines will stretch the seed capital and cut sales cost.
—John Curtis (MBA 1986)

Security concerns for this intellectual property are probably the biggest obstacle standing in the way. Unless companies can be convinced their intellectual property security concerns can be satisfied, this idea won’t fly.
—Neil Olken (MBA 1960)

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