On an early summer Friday morning, a group is paddleboarding along the Wilmington waterways, enjoying the views of the sun peaking on the horizon.
 
The group isn’t on vacation, however, nor are they taking a day off from work to unwind. They are a team of nCino employees taking advantage of free paddleboard lessons and early morning hours before heading off to work, a perk their employer provides.
 
Free surfing and paddleboarding lessons, on-site gyms, no dress codes, competitive health benefits, complimentary food, micro-breweries and communal gardens. Some of the perks and benefits that Wilmington-area tech companies provide their employees might seem like small added bonuses, but in large part they help employers attract talent – a task that has been increasingly harder among businesses in the tech industry.
 
A survey conducted by online job search site Indeed found that 86% of respondents, made up of hiring managers and tech recruiters, said it’s challenging to find and hire tech talent.
 
Locally, recruiting officials from several companies – including CastleBranch, Live Oak Bank, nCino and Atlantic Packaging, which hires those in IT and computer science fields – said at a “Competing with Urban Markets for Top Tech Talent” event held by NC TECH Association in December that they too find it  challenging to hire workers for their companies.
 
“(nCino) brings people to Wilmington to work,” Jill Harrington, director of recruiting at the banking software company, said at the event. “One of the big challenges we have as a company is actually physically getting people to relocate to Wilmington. We have maybe 20 (people in) remote workforce, and they’re in sales – things that make sense for them to be really close to a customer – but every software developer, every data integrations person, they move to Wilmington, they make good money, they put that money back into the community.”
 
While hiring tech talent has been a challenge for some companies nationally, Wilmington tech businesses have been implementing benefits and highlighting the region’s features to try and attract and maintain talent in the Cape Fear region.

 

CastleBranch, a background screening and compliance management firm with about 370 employees, moved to its current Wilmington headquarters facility in 2014, encouraged by incentives it received from the city, New Hanover County and the state to remain and expand in Wilmington.
 
“When CastleBranch expanded its headquarters in 2014, we did it knowing that local tech talent was often graduating then moving to accept jobs outside the region,” said Lauren Henderson, chief financial officer with CastleBranch and president of tekMountain (whose brewery is shown above, photo courtesy of tekMountain). “We knew we had the opportunity to attract talent and keep them here.”
 
Among some of the perks CastleBranch provides are an on-site AstroTurf gym, microbrewery, recreation rooms, communal garden, free surfing and paddleboard lessons and a monthly company celebration to recognize milestones.
 
“Any time a prospective employee interviews with us, we realize they may have a choice between us and another tech company,” Henderson said. “When  they come to our campus, they see the perks we offer, like a relaxed dress code and comprehensive benefits.”  
 
One Wilmington feature that is attractive to potential recruits is the lifestyle it provides, Henderson said.
 
“No one can deny that living close to the beach is attractive,” she said. “Recruits love the quality of life here,  that they can leave work and have time to run the loop at Wrightsville Beach or have dinner at a huge selection of excellent restaurants nearby.”
 
Another Wilmington-based tech company that identified the city’s standard of living as an advantage for hiring talent is nCino, a company that spun-off from Live Oak Bank.
 
“Wilmington has many of the perks of a big city but still maintains its small-town feel, making it a great place to start a career in tech, raise a family or anything in between,” Harrington said. “The lifestyle is very appealing to many recruits; the beaches, relatively low cost of living, climate and the city’s reputation as an emerging technology hub are major draws.”
 
nCino seems to have garnered the attention of those seeking work, receiving 1,500 applications every quarter.
 
The company, which has about 550 employees locally, offers a comprehensive benefits package to every full-time employee from the day he or she starts that includes 100% premium paid health benefits, a 401(k) plan and life insurance, Harrington said.
 
nCino also has a casual dress code, recreation rooms with Ping-Pong tables, free snacks, discounted gym membership, generous paid vacation time and opportunities for career growth, she said. Employees are shown below during a paddleboard outing (photo courtesy of nCino).
 
American Banker named nCino the No. 1 fintech to work for in the country, citing its employee perks as well as its quarterly awards recognizing employees.
 
Harrington said nCino competes not only with the state’s larger cities such as Raleigh and Charlotte for tech talent, but also with national tech hubs in cities such as Austin, Texas; San Francisco and Boston.
 
Apiture, another Wilmington-based company that develops tools for online and mobile financial transitions, was also named on that list as one of the best fintechs to work for, coming in at No. 24.  
 
The company was recognized for its 100% health coverage and weekly happy hour on Fridays.
 
“We work really hard to be a place where people want to work,” said Chris Cox, president and CEO of Apiture. “It starts with our culture. We’ve got a great culture, a small-company feel focused on changing the market for financial technology. We’ve got really great employee benefits. So we believe that if we take care of our employees that they’ll take care of our customers.”
 
Cox said the talent Apiture is looking for comes from all the major tech hotspots around the country, including Raleigh, Austin, Silicon Valley and Boston.
 
“Because this is a smaller town, and it probably doesn’t come top of mind for software engineers as they’re thinking about places where they want to build their careers, it maybe takes a little bit longer for us to recruit software engineers,” Cox said. “But once they understand the opportunities at Apiture, once they understand the great things that are happening here in terms of momentum and technology businesses – fintech’s growing in the Wilmington scene – we can recruit within that context.”
 
These local tech companies are a recent emergence in Wilmington; Apiture was founded in 2017.  



The growth of tech companies in the area mirrors that of the country.
 
The technology industry is an important part of the United States economy, making up about 10% of all jobs in the country in 2016, but contributing 16% of goods and services produced that year among all industries, according to a 2018 report from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
 
The tech industry also provides higher wages for all types of occupations; median wages are higher for those in high-tech industries than they are for those in non-high-tech industries. High-tech is defined by the BLS as businesses with a high concentration of workers in STEM.
 
Despite the high productivity levels of the tech industry and the higher than- average wages that the industry provides, tech companies naturally have been finding it hard to recruit workers. That is because there are more jobs open than workers looking to fill them, said Brooks Raiford, CEO and president with NC TECH Association.
 
“Everyone has a difficult time because demand exceeds supply in most tech hubs like North Carolina,” Raiford said. “However, companies continue to expand, move here and grow here because they feel that the talent pool is strong.”
 
What makes it strong is what Raiford refers to as the “triple play,” a pool made up of graduates from one of the many universities in the state with tech degrees, existing talent that is available to be retrained and talent from other states that want to relocate to North Carolina because of its lower cost of living and access to mountains and beaches.
 
According to a report by CompTIA, a nonprofit that issues IT certifications that surveyed 916 IT professionals, the most influential economic factor tech workers consider when choosing a place to live is cost of living.
 
Wilmington’s cost of living, as measured by the ACCRA Cost of Living  Index for the third quarter of 2018, is lower than the U.S. average and cheaper than that of Charlotte; Asheville; Charleston, South Carolina; and Washington, D.C., but more expensive than Raleigh and Norfolk, Virginia.  
 
While cost of living is an important consideration for workers, salaries give people more purchasing power, helping to offset costs.  
 
The average salary for computer and mathematical occupations in the Wilmington metro area, which include positions such as computer programmers and software developers, was $72,210 with about 2,830 employed in 2018, according to a yearly BLS report.
 
In Raleigh, which had a lower cost of living than Wilmington, the average salary for computer and mathematical occupations was $91,680 with 35,840 employed.

Cox said that while Apiture doesn’t look at state benchmarks for salaries, it seeks to pay competitively.
 
“If we’re going to attract the best people, we have to provide competitive compensation,” Cox said. “We focus on what compensation we have to provide to get the best people at our company.”
 
One of the things Wilmington has going for it is the University of North Carolina Wilmington and Cape Fear Community College from which Apiture recruits for different positions, Cox said.  
 
From 2015 to 2018, UNCW has had 156 graduates with bachelor’s degrees in computer science and 106 with bachelor’s degrees in IT.
 
Although UNCW doesn’t track where its students end up working after they graduate, according to a 2017-18 graduate survey, 94% of IT graduates and 81% of computer science graduates were employed, some of the highest rates among majors.
 
CastleBranch and nCino also recruit students from UNCW.
 
While some of the benefits they offer their emplyees might be similar and others different, Apiture, nCino  and CastleBranch agree on one thing: Wilmington is emerging as a tech center.
 
“Wilmington is already in the process of becoming a tech hub. We’re seeing this happen now,” Henderson said. “Particularly during the last two years, Wilmington has seen rapid growth in the tech industry. Wilmington is currently the home of some of the fastest-growing and strongest tech startups in the state, and these companies attract top tech talent.”
 
The city also benefits from the tech companies that are housed here and its employees.
 
“The way that I think about it is as companies like Apiture and similar companies establish a presence in Wilmington, we create more opportunities for tech talent,” Cox said. “More opportunities mean more talent in town, more talent in town means more opportunities; it’s a virtuous cycle. We’re part of this new and emerging tech scene right here in Wilmington that people want to be a part of.”