Dive Brief:

• General Electric has recently lured top tech executives from Apple, Google and Microsoft, according to CIO.com, continuing the companies evolution to try and become a leading digital organization. To really tempt talent to join the company, GE had to change the perception others had, assuring candidates GE really was undergoing a massive digital transformation.

• To help do so, the company had to reinvent how it recruits and finds talent, bringing in technical recruiters with software domain expertise and offering Silicon Valley-types of compensation packages for its technical talent. 

• For example, a senior software engineer at GE Digital earns about $138,000, according to Glassdoor.com. That is on par with IBM and SAP, though Google and Facebook pay much more. 

Dive Insight:

CEO Jeff Immelt is on a mission to make GE a leading software company by 2020, but he knows he needs talent to get him there. For the last 18 months or so, the company has been working hard to reinvent itself as a software company, launching a major PR campaign and raising salaries to attract top tech talent.

Those efforts now appear to be paying off. As IT leaders from tech companies like Google, Apple and Microsoft join its ranks, GE has started to look more and more like a digital-first company.

GE is targeting industrial companies, which currently stand in the cross hairs of digital transformation as Internet of Things (IoT) technology ramps up. The company is betting big on Predix, its cloud-based platform that connects devices on the industrial internet, to help lead the transformation. 

The company's transformation success thus far is a testament to a driven CEO with a solid vision. Immelt took the challenge of transforming the 125-year-old company head-on. The GE we know tomorrow may soon be very different than the one we recognize for supplying a range of household appliances in days past.