The recruiter’s pitch used to be about the company. The product was interesting, the funding was secure, the founders had done it before, and there was a snack wall. Denver’s tech employers are now running a different script, and it is worth noting what it reveals. They are paying more to land skilled workers, and when they get into the room they talk about the city, because remote and hybrid work widened the pool so thoroughly that the company is no longer the scarce item in the transaction. The candidate is. And a candidate who can work from anywhere needs a reason to be somewhere.
The mechanics are straightforward and go both ways, which is what makes them interesting. When a Denver firm opened its roles to applicants anywhere, it stopped bidding only against other Denver firms and started bidding against everybody, including the coastal employers with bigger compensation bands. That pushes local wages up. Simultaneously, those same coastal employers can now hire the Denver engineer without relocating them, so the local candidate has the coastal offer available without moving house. The result is a market where a mid-sized city employer has to beat a national price while also explaining why the person should put their furniture in a truck. Money closes the first argument. Nothing but the place closes the second.
This is the roasting problem in another costume. For years the specialty cafe competed on the bean, and once good green coffee became available to everyone, the bean stopped being a differentiator. Two shops on the same street could pour an identically excellent espresso. What decided which one filled up was everything that was not the coffee: the light through the window, the bench outside, whether you could sit for an hour without being hurried. Denver’s employers have reached that point. The job is the espresso, and the espresso is now broadly comparable across the whole country. So they sell the window.
The insight is that they are right to. Location, for a knowledge worker with options, is a compensation component that happens not to appear on the payslip. Housing that can be bought rather than rented indefinitely, a commute measured in minutes, a Saturday that can contain actual mountains, schools that do not require a lottery. These are worth real money, and more to the point they are worth real money that the employer does not have to pay. A firm selling a city is spending the municipality’s assets on its own hiring problem, which is the cheapest line in any recruiting budget and the only one that compounds, because the person who moves for the place is harder for the next recruiter to dislodge than the person who moved for the number.
There is a bill attached, and it arrives locally. Upward wage pressure in tech lands in a labour market shared with everyone else, and the people competing for the same housing on non-tech salaries experience the arrival of a well-paid remote-capable cohort as rent rather than as growth. Every city that has run this play has found that the asset being sold is consumable. Sell enough of the easy commute and the quiet neighbourhood and the reasonable house price, and at some point the pitch stops being true, which is precisely when the recruiters discover it was the only thing they had left.
For now the arithmetic holds and Denver is using it. The firms that understand what they are actually doing will push on the part they control, which is the work itself, because the window belongs to the city and the city can be rented by any competitor who opens an office down the road. The ones that mistake the view for a strategy will keep raising pay while reciting the altitude, and will be very surprised when a candidate asks what the company does.
Source: The Colorado Sun, “Denver tech employers are paying more and selling the city to land workers”