Reversing the brain drain: Local nonprofit works to keep talent 'inTulsa'

“That was a huge part of our pitch,” said Aaron Miller, a former program officer for the George Kaiser Family Foundation, which contributed to the Tesla campaign.

Ultimately, of course, it didn’t persuade Tesla, and the company chose Austin over Tulsa for a $1.1 billion Cybertruck factory. But GKFF officials had gained valuable experience in job-matching and looked for a different way to put the lessons to use.

“We said, ‘Well, we need to be ready for the next big push,’” Miller explained. “’We need to create more of an ongoing system that can link talent to companies.’”

Tulsa Remote, a GKFF-funded program that literally pays people to move here, was already working to bring new talent to the city. A nonprofit formed in partnership with GKFF, called inTulsa, focuses instead on keeping the talent Tulsa already has.

InTulsa helps connect local talent with tech jobs, letting people seek higher salaries and advance their careers without moving away. Since spinning off as a separate effort in 2021, the group has helped hundreds of Tulsans find new jobs and has an active talent pool with more than 5,000 candidates, said Miller, inTulsa’s head of strategic partnerships.

“We don’t want our super talented people to leave,” he said. “We want to find opportunities for people to stay here.”

Dating back at least as far as 2013, Tulsa had faced a “brain drain” with college graduates moving away at higher rates than they were moving into the city, according to inTulsa data. The trend seemed to be improving by the late 2010s, however, and it reversed itself after COVID-19 gave a tremendous boost to the popularity of remote work.

“Since the pandemic has started,” said Jake Cronin, director of research and analytics, “Tulsa has actually reversed this brain drain to where you are seeing a positive trend of college graduates moving into the area at higher rates than they are leaving.”

Remote work alone can’t necessarily account for the trend, but it certainly helps that people no longer have to leave Tulsa to work for companies that aren’t located here. InTulsa, however, doesn’t want to keep people here just to work for far-away companies.

A better talent pool will attract new employers and encourage local start-ups, creating more high-tech jobs in Tulsa, Cronin said.

“We monitor job postings analytics data, so we can sort of monitor the demand for tech jobs in Tulsa,” he said. “The demand is growing and is growing at a pretty quick pace.”

For more information, go to talent.intulsa.com.

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