Hundreds or thousands of talented professionals are visiting your company’s web pages every day, but how do you stay connected with these potential candidates over time? Today, LinkedIn is launching a powerful new way to stay in touch by inviting these professionals to follow your company on LinkedIn in just a single click.

The Company Follow Button is a plug-in you can add to any web page, including your company home page or career website. Visitors to your websites will be able to start following your company’s status updates with the literal click of a button.

Followers are a tremendously valuable pool of talent for recruiting teams. These are professionals—many of them passive candidates—who want to learn more about your company.

Company Status Updates give you a direct line of communication to these followers. You can share job opportunities, articles about your company, or info on exciting initiatives your employees are working on. These messages appear in the network update stream of every follower’s LinkedIn homepage and go viral as members Like, Share and Comment on updates. Followers will also receive automatic updates any time you post a job that’s relevant to them.

Leaders at companies like Starbucks and Sony Electronics plan to be among the first to implement the button. “We’re excited about adding the Company Follow Button. Candidates are more apt to have jobs-related conversations and network on LinkedIn than on other platforms, and we’re looking forward to connecting with more of them,” says Jeremy Langhans, Starbucks’ Employment Brand and Channels Program Manager.

Add the Company Follow Button today and give interested candidates an even easier way to stay connected. It only takes a few minutes to set up.

Click here for more information and step-by-step instructions on getting started.

Note: join our webinar on January 31st to understand how your organization’s recruiting spend stacks up. You’ll also hear useful tips on bringing your costs under control.

Bersin & Associates recently released its first-ever benchmarking report on US corporate recruiting, and there is some good news for recruiting professionals – for example, corporate spending on talent acquisition is up, and companies are hiring more recruiters. That’s a very positive sign considering the layoffs and spending cuts we saw during the last few years.

Hiring still remains an expensive business in the US, with the average cost per hire around $3500. However, large organizations (those with 10,000 or more employees) seem able to drive significant economies of scale, with their cost per hire coming in under $2000, just over half what small companies (100-999 employees) tend to pay.

The findings also highlight some key changes in sourcing strategies. They show some bad news for agencies and headhunters – one-half of companies say they decreased their spending here.   And although job boards remain popular – used to fill 19 percent of open positions – they are definitely at risk.  Progressive organizations are reducing their spending on job boards in favor of new tools that source both active and passive candidates. These tools include professional networking sites, social media, search engine marketing, CRM technology and others.

While these new sourcing tools are still in their infancy, our interviews with corporate talent acquisition leaders suggest that they are generating higher quality leads at lower cost than traditional job boards.  A goal is to also use these tools to improve the overall candidate experience, thereby developing relationships with applicants for different or future positions, as well as those currently available.

To find out how you can make your US corporate recruiting budget go further in 2012, tune into our webinar on January 31st featuring Bersin & Associates.