High-tech industry on hiring binge in California

It's the Silicon Valley hiring boom being felt all over California. C

alifornia added nearly 100,000 new jobs in February, and the state's unemployment rate dropped by two-tenths of a percentage point, to 12.2% from 12.4% in January, in part led by a hiring surge in high tech, the California Economic Development Department reported. Top technology companies are competing fiercely for engineers, designers, computer scientists, data crunchers and other workers with specialized technical skills. But the hiring frenzy has also begun to reach workers with other kinds of skills. Internet search giant Google gave all of its 24,000 employees a 10% raise this year. And it announced in January that 2011 would be its biggest hiring year ever. Google does not disclose specific hiring numbers, but its previous biggest hiring year was 2007, when it added nearly 6,200 people around the globe. Facebook has more than 2,000 employees, 1,400 of whom are in Palo Alto, and it's growing at a rate of about 50% a year. Popular social gaming company Zynga, which has more than 1,500 employees, expects to double that number in the next year. The San Francisco company is on a hiring streak: Zynga has hired 224 people in California so far this year, and it hired 563 last year.