#2 Fastest Growing Region for Green Jobs
Brookings Institution, July 2011

Talent Attraction

The Triangle is at an exciting crossroads, continuing to lead the country in nearly every measure of economic success. And using a metaphor that’s apropos for our region – with its legacy of producing championship basketball teams - our talent bench is already quite deep, especially when compared with many other metropolitan areas of our size across the nation.

But as the global competition for the world’s best and brightest heats up, the Triangle’s business leaders have recognized that we must continue to retain, cultivate and replenish our most important asset – people – in order for our region to flourish in the decades to come. The ability for places to attract talent will be one of the single most important factors in determining the locations that “win” and those that “lose” in the new, extremely competitive global economy – and we aim to chalk up another “W” in that category.

To do this, Wake County Economic Development has begun laying the groundwork for a new talent attraction campaign, called “Work in the Triangle.” The campaign’s goal is to help the Triangle market and position itself nationally and internationally as one of the top destinations for talented professionals in the next five years.

This mission supports that talent recruitment initiative of the EDGE4 – Growing Great Campaign, which aims to expand the number of highly skilled employees in target industry sectors by 2013 and is one of five strategies designed to bring prosperity and growth to the region.

In the coming months, we’ll be:

• Developing content, including videos, testimonials and resource links for a talent attraction jobs portal that will launch in the spring: www.workinthetriangle.com;
• Engaging people like you to help spread positive news and key rankings for the Triangle to your social networks and become “Digital Ambassadors” for the region;
• Holding discussions with industry leaders and associations to determine our target sectors’ exact employment needs;
• Proactively sharing the Triangle story through a strategic public relations campaign;
• Leveraging social, digital and mobile media to help tell our opportunity story and share employment needs and job openings;
• Hosting a campaign kickoff event on May 9, featuring guest speaker Joel Kotkin, a demographer and Forbes’ columnist, who has written and spoken about the Triangle’s potential to be one of the U.S.’s top hot spots in the coming decades.

If you’d like to get involved or have ideas for how we can attract more talented professionals like you to our region, email us at kelly@workinthetriangle.com or follow us on Facebook at facebook.com/WorkInTheTriangle.

This campaign is based on a Marketing Blueprint for Talent Attraction that Development Counsellors International (DCI) designed on behalf of Wake County Economic Development. For more information on this initiative, please contact Jennifer Bosser at jbosser@raleighchamber.org or Kelly Maness at kmaness@raleighchamber.org.