For new Oracle Corp. hires, California is a hotter destination than Boston, according to one of its chief executives. But Beantown has its own benefits that make it one of the most important recruiting and operating locales for the computer technology giant, he said.
Mark Hurd, the co-CEO of Oracle (NYSE: ORCL), told local business leaders at Boston College’s Chief Executives Club on Wednesday that the company still emphasizes recruiting on college campuses. According to Hurd, Oracle recruits 1,300 students a year in a sector that’s “historically been a mercenary industry.”
A good chunk of those employees get their start in Boston, one of Oracle’s four U.S. hubs, alongside Reston, Virginia; Austin, Texas; and Redwood Shores, California. The California-based company employs more than 3,000 people in its Burlington, Massachusetts, location and elsewhere in Greater Boston out of more than 120,000 workers worldwide, according to Hurd.
He said Oracle actively recruits students from New England schools, noting that Boston College alone is home to dozens of its new hires this year. Whether those students want to stay in New England after they graduate, however, is a separate matter. The same goes for new hires who studied elsewhere, he said.
“From a recruiting perspective, it’s hard to get people to come to Boston. It’s not the easiest place to recruit. Everybody on the West Coast wants to work on the West Coast. Many people on the East Coast want to move to the West Coast,” Hurd said. He cited weather and Silicon Valley's booming tech sector as primary reasons for the general preference to move elsewhere.
To compensate for that wanderlust, Oracle has to over-recruit in the region compared to the West Coast, according to Hurd. But the Boston hub is valuable to the company because of the pipeline of young talent it produces, Hurd said. And once Oracle hires an employee in Boston, they’re much more likely to stay with the company than Oracle’s California workers, he said.
Hurd recognized the perils that come with relying so much on new graduates for employees, pointing to millennials’ penchant for leaving companies after a few years and the possibility they’ll be poached after Oracle pays to train them. But the payoff is worth it, he said.
“If you’re going to interview someone for three hours, what are the chances of it being successful? Pretty low,” he said. “Versus, you have them for two, three, four, five years, what’s the chance of that person being successful? Much higher.”