Status update blitz drives 60 percent increase in sales team referrals
Many organizations recognize that their employees are a vital source of strong hires. So when salesforce.com needed to hire hundreds of account executives and sales engineers, it made perfect sense for the company to turn inward and leverage its own employees. CEO Marc Benioff emailed his sales team with a simple request – Get the word out via your networks.
Bersin & Associates has hosted its IMPACT conference for five years now, but it’s only in the last year or two that talent acquisition has become a significant portion of the program. I had the chance to attend the event in St. Petersburg, FL last week and was impressed by the caliber of the attendees and the discussion.
Rather than rehash the conference in long-form, I’ve aggregated 20 tweets into six themes that capture my main observations, from Josh Bersin’s keynote and from the talent acquisition-focused breakout sessions:
LinkedIn has just made the most important third-party recruiter networking technique I learned in the good ‘ol days available to everyone. This is a bad day for the old-timers like me, but good for everyone else who wants to quickly find great candidates for hard-to-fill jobs.
I call the technique the cherry-picker, or the leveraged-referral, or the how to really get some great pre-qualified candidate names who will call you back. You’ll call it amazing. If you have an employee referral program (ERP), you’ll be able to boost its effectiveness 50-100% using this new LinkedIn Recruiter feature.
LinkedIn is focused on connecting talent with opportunity at massive scale. Today, we’re proud to announce the upcoming LinkedIn Referral Engine (coming in 2011), which will connect companies with the best talent resource they have—the thousands or millions of people their employees already know.