We grew up in Leicestershire and having lived and worked abroad and elsewhere in the UK, decided to return to our routes. With great universities such as Loughborough, Leicester and De Montfort, all within the county and championing tech, the talent graduating locally will be second to none. Leicester also is perfectly situated to recruit talent from major tech cities such as Nottingham and Birmingham, less than 45 minutes away. With Leicester being the one of the most diverse cities in the UK, we felt that the opportunity to attract diverse talent and thinking would only benefit our business. There’s a growing buzz around the tech scene in Leicester and we couldn’t be more proud and excited to be a part of it.

When we were founding Bulb, everyone told us we should set up our business away from London because wages are too high here. However, London has been a fantastic home for our company because we can draw upon such a diverse pool of skilled people. There are so many different industries to learn from and so many different types of skillsets and capabilities available. London has a wealth of designers, researchers, software engineers, and data scientists and we’re very fortunate to not only hire those people into the Bulb team, but also for our team to be part of the broader communities of practice that exist in the city…

There’s a fantastic energy up here. The region also inherently has a strong innovation thread running throughout it that has resulted in it being one of the UK’s strongest tech hubs; one where creative minds can thrive, create and challenge the status quo. It’s this problem solving, creative and inquisitive attitude that goes down well at Sage. Add into the mix the warm personalities here and it is the perfect combination for us and it’s one our customers love.

Northern Ireland has great educational establishments producing high quality people. We also have some world class technology companies where people have the opportunity to develop their skills and experience. As a result, we have been able to recruit some fantastic people. We work very hard to ensure that Novosco is a fantastic employer, including investing significantly to ensure we have world-class office premises…

We started our quest to address the skills gap in 2015, and the more we do within our community and in our city the more we’ve realised it’s not the lack of skills that are an issue – we have plenty of skills just very little opportunity to showcase them. Through the delivery of Catalyst, we’ve been introduced to young talent across the city region who have the skills but don’t have the knowledge of what the creative and digital landscape looks like in the city.

When the company first set out to build its team it was able to hire from the pool of mobile game talent that already existed in Dundee.
However, due to the demand for our games and our ambitions to build out our product portfolio, we quickly found ourselves sourcing talent from the various games hubs out with Scotland. Outplay currently has 52 team members from outside the UK. This is a mix of 25 different nationalities in our studio and makes up 30% of our team. We value and greatly benefit from the diversity this brings our team’s skill sets and the player experience gained from a mixed team, so our talent strategy is built around attracting and relocating talent from across the world.

The strong academic and entrepreneurial ethos of the city makes Oxford a great place for a tech business to be located. The ability to exploit many networking opportunities and its name aids in this. On the other hand, Oxfordshire is a small city compared to London as everyone knows everyone else, but at the same time it can be hard to reach are your full potential. Often I am travelling between both cities

We chose Bristol for its unique mix of technical, design and UX communities, incredible food scene and agricultural resources, and vibrant arts and music scenes…when I visited last year while scouting for potential locations I was immediately taken with the “big city but small city feel” and then learned a lot more about what this great city has to offer…

The company has been Newport-based since launch. In that time it’s been on a journey from a disruptive start-up, to a plc listed on the London Stock Exchange. Being based in Newport has allowed the business to benefit from good transport links, sound infrastructure and lower operating costs than you might get in a bigger city, and certainly than in London. The talent pool is fit for purpose too. Our location and reputation has attracted some of the best minds from on our doorstep onto our payroll, and has also pulled in people from Bristol, Cardiff, Swansea, London and other areas throughout south Wales, south west England and the whole UK…

One of the benefits of being Birmingham based, is that we have so many local tech and education communities around us, all of which are incredibly helpful and collaborative. We’ve found and hired many of our team from local universities, technology and coding clubs (such as Rebel Makers) and tech communities such as Innovation Birmingham and Silicon Canal. Where we have hired experienced team members, we’ve always found good quality people within the West Midlands who share our values and have added to the business in so many ways…By taking a longer-term approach to recruitment for our technology teams in Birmingham, we’re gradually starting to build an incredibly solid, talented and most importantly diverse and inclusive team of amazing people.

Sheffield is a natural home for The Floow for a number of reasons. Firstly, the city boasts one of the largest and best quality pools of graduate talent in the country, produced by our two world class universities. Secondly, Sheffield residents enjoy a fantastic quality of life and affordable cost of living, which means we’re able to attract talent from across the country, and even across Europe, adding to the diversity of knowledge and expertise in this growing hub. And thirdly, Sheffield is well positioned as part of the Northern Powerhouse to develop its growing reputation as a centre of excellence for data science and digital industries. All of this makes Sheffield a great place to build a vibrant, innovative business like The Floow.