Apple employees most likely to leave to join Google, says LinkedIn analysis

An analysis of LinkedIn profiles in the tech industry reveals that the most popular destination for former Apple employees is Google.

Unsurprisingly, it also shows people making the switch in the opposite direction, though Apple employees are most likely to have come from Intel, Microsoft, or Amazon …

Switch on Business carried out the analysis.

To find which tech giants attract the most talent from competitors, Switch on Business explored employee profiles on Linkedin for a selection of tech companies.

First, the team searched how many employees currently worked in these companies: Google (Alphabet), Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, IBM, Tesla, Oracle, Netflix, Nvidia, Salesforce, Adobe, Intel and Uber.

Then, for each pair of companies, they searched for employees who currently work in each tech giant and previously worked for each other company from the seed list.

The team then calculated the count and % of current employees at each tech giant who previously worked at other tech giants. The full data allowed them to provide breakdowns of the most common pathways between tech giants.

In the case of Apple, it found that employees were most likely to enter the company from:

1. Intel
2. Microsoft
3. Amazon
4. Google
5. IBM
6. Oracle
7. Tesla
8. Nvidia
9. Adobe
10. Meta

Intel heading the list of course reflects the large number of employees taken on when Apple spent a billion dollars buying the chipmaker’s smartphone modem business back in 2019, as it seeks to design its own radio chips.

For those leaving Apple, they were almost twice as likely to go to Google than to the next biggest destination, Amazon. The rankings were:

1. Google
2. Amazon
3. Meta
4. Microsoft
5. Tesla
6. Nvidia
7. Salesforce
8. Adobe
9. Intel
10. Oracle

The overlap between the in and out lists is no surprise, of course. What may be more surprising is that – as an overall percentage of its workforce – Apple recruits relatively few of its employees from other tech giants: just 5.7%. This is in stark contrast to Meta (26.5%), Google (25.1%), and Salesforce (20.7%).

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