Which city can fill Amazon jobs the fastest to become home to HQ2?

Over 100 cities are interested in Amazon’s HQ2 RFP, but some find engineering talent faster than others

Amazon surprised all of us in Seattle with the announcement that they are looking for another major city in North America to be their second headquarters. They released a formal Request for Proposals that has already aroused a lot of interest across the US and Canada: it’s been said that over 100 cities have started considering their bids. What’s not surprising is that the first requirement they listed in the RFP was this:

We are looking for a location with strong local and regional talent — particularly in software development and related fields…

Luckily for Amazon, Textio has a data set that contains over a quarter billion job postings and associated hiring outcomes, so the platform already knows which cities can hire qualified tech talent the fastest. If we add in their population requirement — cities with more than a million people—that leaves 56 places that are eligible to be Amazon’s next prime location.

Pundits vs. hiring data

The city that fills engineering jobs the absolute fastest at just over 15 and a half days is Birmingham, Alabama. Birmingham hasn’t topped many of the pundits lists, but if a key component for Amazon is filling engineering roles, they may be an underdog to keep an eye on.

Now let’s see how other pundit selections panned out:

• The New York Times selected Denver as the overall best place for Amazon to set up, but looking at the data Denver is tenth from the bottom as one of the slowest places for engineering jobs to fill at just under 35 days
• Geekwire chose Toronto as their number one spot, but they actually came in second to last in filling engineering jobs fast almost 41 days to fill an empty role.
• CNN placed Atlanta as its finalist which ended up in the middle of the pack with 30 days to fill an engineering role.
• Venturebeat put Austin at the top of heap, which is too bad as it was just above Denver with over 32 days to fill an engineering role on average.
• Not a pundit, but our favorite story thus far was Tucson giving Amazon a 21 foot cactus (which Amazon promptly donated). Tucson alas, is just above Atlanta at just over 29 days to fill an engineering role.

Textio Top 10 Cities for Amazon HQ2

If Amazon is serious about attracting top engineering talent quickly, then they need to look at how fast each city is filling tech jobs. Here are the top 10 cities they should seriously consider for HQ2, according to the hiring data.

That said, we know Amazon is looking at more than just tech talent, so potentially these cities can use their fast hiring to their advantage as this saga continues to unfold.

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