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BoF LIVE: Can Fashion Compete with Tech for Executive Talent?

The tech industry is scooping up fashion executives by offering benefits and career boosts that many fashion companies can’t provide — BoF unpacks what brands can do to attract and retain top talent.
How Fashion Can Compete With Tech for Executive Talent

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This #BoFLIVE event was based on the ‘Can Fashion Compete with Tech for Executive Talent?’ article. Click here to read our full analysis.

For ambitious, future-focused professionals, the lure of the tech industry’s wide-reaching benefits and career-boosting opportunities has proved hard to resist. In the past few years, fashion leaders like Yves Saint Laurent’s Paul Deneve and Burberry’s Angela Ahrendts have left their brands for Apple, while top editors at publications like Allure and Vogue departed for Netflix and Amazon. To recruit and retain top talent, fashion brands can no longer rely solely on the cultural cache that jobs at glossy magazines or buzzy brands carry. Instead, they must provide real value for employees: generous benefits, skills-building opportunities and experiences, as well as flexibility.

“A big piece of today’s world is really allowing executives to be the best they can be, but in a way that feels authentic to them,” said Caroline Pill, partner at Kirk Palmer Associates.

In the latest BoFLive, Pill joins recent fashion-to-tech transplant Adrienne Lofton, vice president of platforms and ecosystems brand marketing at Google, and BoF senior correspondent Sheena Butler-Young, following her piece on the topic, to discuss the reasons behind the trend and how fashion can play to its strengths when attracting talent.

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