Certainly we know at EnGn that recruiting for great .net, java, ruby, mobile, and
salesforce developers in Portland was never easy.
However, as a panelist for a recent Tech. America event I was pleasantly surprised to see that interest in attracting talent was top of mind once again. For an event like this to fill up generally means a tipping point as been reached where the ability to find talent to grow the business is impacting how a business can accomplish key objectives. With recent BLS statistics showing that software and application developers are running only a 3.6% unemployment it shouldn't be a surprise.
I had 10 minutes to discuss what is going on in town regarding recruiting Portland technical talent. 
Given how long-winded I generally am this was the hardest part of the morning. I picked one thing. Talent communities. Find a couple internal evangelists (especially ones in key job categories where you expect to grow). Build a plan and set goals. Arm them with any number of tools. Listen, talk, engage, and promote all things wonderful about what you are doing in your company. Do it now and do it even when things slow down. In other words, this the web 2.0 of what old school recruiters, like me, used to call recruiting for a drawyer. The difference is we have access to amazing, interactive, integrated, and cheap tools to do so. Obviously, I am truncating a much broader and very interesting conversation/program that could be had. 10 minutes is 10 minutes.
After the event I got a chance to meet with some folks from Learning for Leverage (formerly Oregon Training Network) and they are putting on what appears to be a timely training day later this month: Foster the People: How to Attract and Keep Top Tech. Talent It is being held at Stoel Rives on February 21st. Check it out. Your competition for talent could be.
As the tech. industry acknowledges and embraces the power of mobile computing, we at the EnGn have seen a greater demand for candidates with mobile development experience. HTML5 paves the way for a highly interactive experience users can use on mobile internet browsers, but the greater focus has been in building native "apps" for the Google Android and Apple iOS mobile operating systems.
Mobile apps provide users a customized user experience specific to their phone or tablet, and it makes the entire user experience more friendly and visuallly appealing. As a tech hotbed, Portland Oregon has its own mobile community of developers from established companies and startups. The Mobile Portland community meets on the last monday of every month. As Portland technical recruiters for EnGn Matt Levine and Peter McRobert attended the last meeting held at Urban Airship, a local mobile startup, to learn more about the Portland mobile software development movement and stay abreast of the issues. They went knowing the skills were in demand but left with a new appreciation for the growing tital wave just around the corner. Another take away was that the Portland mobile application development community seemed to prefer ios applications development over Android. 
While Android development will take advantage of Portland's Java software development expertise for now Matt and Peter felt iOS is where most were wanting to spend their time.