The ultimate compliment in recruiting these days is to be considered a talent advisor. So you can imagine how I felt when the following criticisms were leveled at my talent acquisition team by some of our more vocal business partners, as recently as 18 months ago:
- Recruiting isn’t good enough.
Editor’s note: 15 days from now, over 2000 talent acquisition professionals will join us at Talent Connect Las Vegas, LinkedIn’s global corporate customer conference. Register by 11.59pm PT today (Tuesday, Sept 25th) to qualify for special pricing.
I’m a corporate recruiting leader (Amazon, Expedia) turned consultant. And I’ve been fortunate to partner with heads of recruitment from some amazing companies – from Nike to Hitachi, the World Bank to Electronic Arts, Edward Jones to Groupon. One of the things on many talent acquisition leaders’ priority lists – and they are LONG lists – is work focused on helping their recruiters become more strategic and consultative. These aren’t lofty “seat at the table” wishes…they are driven by real needs for their teams, who are often working too many open reqs or doing too much administrative or systems work, to get in the driver’s seat …they want them to be more strategic. And the recruiters are on board; they want it, too. So the issue isn’t convincing someone to be more strategic, it’s trying to figure out how to do that in the real world of competing priorities, limited resources, and not enough hours in the day.
2011 was undoubtedly LinkedIn’s biggest year to date: we crossed the 100 million member mark, started trading on the New York Stock Exchange and welcomed President Obama for a town hall on jobs and the economy. We also spent plenty of time thinking about how we can make Talent Acquisition professionals more productive and successful in their roles, and how we can work with them to revolutionize the recruiting industry.
Before we jump feet-first into the year that’s upon us, let’s take a look back at the biggest milestones of last year. Here are the top ten ways that LinkedIn made you a better recruiter in 2011.