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Note: Lars Schmidt is the Senior Director, Talent Acquisition & Innovation for NPR, and blogs regularly at Amplify Talent.  

My first LinkedIn Talent Connect conference is in the books. As I wrote in a blog post on my way to Las Vegas, there were quite a few things I was looking forward to at my first #InTalent. The turnout was strong, with almost 2,000 recruiters from around the world converging on Las Vegas for three days of networking, sharing and learning. The energy was palpable. It was great being surrounded by so many of my recruiting peers at a conference.

This article was co-authored with Amy McKee, Sr. Director of Global Talent Acquisition, and Matthew Jeffery, Head of EMEA Talent Acquisition & Global Talent Brand, at Autodesk.

Mobile …finally! DNA footprints in the cloud; recruiting back to basics: getting to know the candidate; the end of the traditional ATS; emerging markets dominate; augmented reality; disruptive marketing and stunt PR; the end of social media; candidate cloning and the end of recruiters as we know it!

Today, at LinkedIn Talent Connect, we are unveiling new tools, including Talent Brand Index, that help recruiting teams better measure their talent brand, build their talent pipeline with warm prospects, and automatically target the best passive talent.

The transformation of the talent acquisition profession is accelerating. To remain competitive in a world where hiring the best talent is increasingly challenging and where talent is the single most important driver of an organization’s success, recruiting teams need to start thinking about career opportunities the way marketers think about products. They also need to think about candidates the way marketers think about customers.

Earlier this year, we introduced Talent Pipeline, a powerful set of tools now included with LinkedIn Recruiter that thousands of you are using to help build and nurture your pipelines of prospective hires.  But what if Recruiter could go one step further and provide you not only with the tools, but with the warm leads – talented professionals, who are already interested in your company.  Today at LinkedIn Talent Connect, we announced just that – the ability to identify and engage with Company Followers, right in Recruiter.

On LinkedIn, tens of millions of members are now following companies that interest them.  Each one of these individuals has raised his or her hand and asked to hear directly from the company they’re following – some want to hear news or product announcements, but even more are interested in working there. In fact, when we surveyed Followers, 70% said that they follow companies primarily to hear about career opportunities.