The problem of the flight of tech talent in Europe looks exactly like a poorly posed marketing problem. To retain engineers in the face of Switzerland or Silicon Valley, companies must
I don’t recruit engineers. I manage marketing recruitment mass: hundreds of positions to fill, performance channels, funnels that I adjust at cost per candidate. And from there, seen from my job, the problem of European tech talent looks exactly like a poorly posed marketing problem.
Look at the mechanics. The French engineering school is a magnificent top of the funnel. In 2023, it had 173,962 students in engineering training (INSEE/MESR, taken up by the Syntec/Ipsos barometer). Every year, it releases a premium audience onto the market: profiles with a solid mathematical and algorithmic base, ready to convert. Sourcing is already done, free of charge, by the academic system and public money.
The problem comes to the next step: conversion. A part of this audience, once graduated, does not sign in France. And here, we have to look at the figures, not the clichés.
First myth to bust: Silicon Valley is not the first thief
Everyone keeps saying that the Valley sucks our engineers. The data says something else. According to the IESF (Engineers and Scientists of France), out of 1,137,000 active engineers in 2023, 144,076 work abroad. The first host country is Switzerland, with 23,071 French engineers (+56% in ten years). Then Germany (15,445). The United States only comes in third place: 12,686 engineers, almost half as many as Switzerland.
As for young graduates, the same image. There Conference of Grandes Écoles (CGE, 2025 survey) shows that 11.2% of 2024 graduates work internationally, and 42.8% of them remain in the European Union. The first destination? Switzerland again (16.3%), ahead of Luxembourg (9.6%) and Germany (8.9%). The United States only accounts for 5.3%: sixth destination.
So the flight is not an exodus to California. It is a slow erosion towards neighboring markets which pay better, starting with Switzerland. Except that this observation consoles no one. On the contrary: it worsens the diagnosis. Because if you don’t hold your talents to Geneva or Munich, the problem is not a distant ocean. It is at your doorstep.
And the trend is not reversing. The proportion of engineers who expatriate at the start of career hovers around 10% and oscillates between 12 and 16% per year for active engineers, but the absolute number of expatriates has increased by 23% in ten years (IESF). The forming machine runs faster than the holding machine.
The price war is lost in advance, and the Élysée says so
Why does the conversion fail? Because we are trying to win it on the wrong lever: salary.
The gap is real. On a clean and comparable measure, the OECD places the average American salary at 82,933 dollars compared to 60,608 for France (2024, in purchasing power parity): almost 37% difference across the entire economy. In tech, the gap is widening. A median developer in the United States earns $133,080 (BLS, May 2024). A young engineer in France starts at around 39,000 euros excluding bonuses (CGE 2025). Compare like for like — net versus net, gross versus gross, and in purchasing power — and the gap is reduced, but it does not disappear. It explodes especially at the top of the market: at Levels.fyi, the median total remuneration of a senior engineer in the best companies reaches 265,000 dollars in San Francisco compared to 175,805 in Zurich, the leading European city. The difference is RSUs, these distributed shares which are the norm in American tech and remain rare in France.
Add the tax burden and the cost of compliance (AI Act, GDPR), which extend the time-to-market and eat up budgets that could go to R&D or remuneration. We spend on validation legal what the other spends on signing bonuses.
Conclusion: no one wins a price war against someone richer than themselves. And the most interesting thing is that at the top of the State, we understood it. In 2023, for the 10th anniversary of French Tech, Emmanuel Macron said: “the real battle, the heart of the battle, is talent.” And he added, on the salary comparison: “when we compare ourselves to the United States of America or to others, we are cheaper. We don’t say it enough.” In February 2025, at the AI Action Summit, France announced 109 billion euros of private investment in its AI sector (ReutersLe Monde).
The intention is there, the means follow: the French Tech Visa simplifies the arrival of foreign talent, the objective of one million apprentices structures the training pipeline. What is missing is not public money. It’s the marketing grammar to turn all that into conversions.
Shift paradigm: sell EVP, not salary
In marketing, when your product is more expensive than the alternative with equal features, you don’t lower the price. You change the value proposition. Here, the product is the position. And it must be sold differently: on a strong EVP — the Employee Value Proposition — and real positioning. Not one slogan HR. A reason to choose you, which does not exist opposite.
These are the three levers which, in a funnel logic, hold water.
1. Capture early: alternation as a drop in CAC
In marketing, keeping a customer costs less than acquiring a new one. Work-study is the perfect tool to lower the cost of acquiring a candidate (CAC) and maximize their lifetime value (LTV). And the terrain is favorable: according to the CGE, end-of-study internships and apprenticeships remain the first route to their first job, for 40.7% of graduates.
We must capture the student when their career preferences are being formed, not when they leave school. Integrate him into the ecosystem early, build brand attachment while he learns. At the time of graduation, the candidate must not be a cold lead in an open market where Zurich and the Valley are outbidding each other. He must already be an ambassador for your brand. The acquisition battle is won two years before hiring.
2. Autonomy as a unique value proposition
The marketing of the giants has a weak point: with them, the engineer is seen as a cog. A function in a huge machine. This is where you should strike.
The proposal from European projects — startups, scale-ups — is contained in one sentence: “Here, you don’t code a button in a product that you will never see in full. You shape the architecture.” On the one hand, spending three years on a microservice in a software factory where you’ll never see the finished product. On the other, design an architecture from scratch and see it run in production. For an audience with high intellectual capital, the second scenario often trumps money alone. This is not HR theory: it is segmentation. You don’t sell the same thing to someone who wants a salary and someone who wants a playground.
3. Stability, new premium
American tech has accustomed the market to high volatility: aggressive hiring, then waves of layoffs overnight. Let’s be honest — European startups are laying off people too. So don’t sell lifelong job security: no one believes it. Sell something else, more credible and just as rare — the predictability of processes, and a pace where the engineer does not burn out in a year until the release.
Social protection, work-life balance, a planning horizon: all this must no longer be seen as “boring bureaucracy”. It’s the new luxury. You’re selling predictability and protection against burnout — triggers that work really well for an audience that’s maturing, starting a family, and stopping chasing the next unicorn.
And the moment is rare. In 2025, the flow is partly reversed: faced with American budget cuts in research, researchers based in the United States are turning to Europe, and the Union has launched “Choosing Europe for Science”, allocated 500 million euros over 2025-2027 (European Commission, May 2025). The window is open. You still have to know how to sell.
In the end
Europe will not beat the budgets of Silicon Valley — or even those of Switzerland. No need to try. But we can win this campaign differently: through the right brand positioning, personalization of the candidate experience from the start of the funnel, and an offer of meaning that multinationals do not have.
In talent marketing, it’s not the one who pays the most for the lead who wins. It’s the one whose product addresses the audience’s real pain. France already has the most expensive top of the funnel in the world, financed by public money. It is time to stop offering conversion to the highest bidder.
