Acquiring and retaining great talent is the holy grail of successful companies. A few technology companies are fortunate enough to enjoy the status of ‘the company everyone wants to work at’ and receive thousands of resumes each week. They are some of the most recognizable names in business today.
But cool companies don’t remain cool for very long. Employer brands change. Those icons inevitably become the sources for talent from which the up and coming companies recruit. How do new, cool companies identify and engage with exceptional talent? How do the formerly cool companies find talent when they are no longer knocking at their door? How do the ‘other 99%’ of companies win battles for talent? It’s a battle that requires constant changes in campaign strategy and early adoption of new tools and methodologies.
Networking through employee referrals has always been one of the most effective recruiting strategies. LinkedIn revolutionized recruiting by creating a social network and communication channel that facilitates highly targeted campaigns and strong ROI. Today, 433 million professional profiles populate LinkedIn, bringing a new level of lead generation and qualification into the hands of recruiters and ultimately enabling efficient and scalable campaigns for recruiting passive candidates.
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That ease of accessing profiles and running passive campaigns, however, has come at a cost. In conversations with candidates and talent acquisition colleagues, LinkedIn’s value as a recruiting communication channel has deteriorated over the past few years. Candidates have come to view LinkedIn as a license for recruiters to spam them. They create alternative emails to log into their accounts but routinely ignore email messages and solicitations (InMails). To its credit, LinkedIn now monitors the response rate for bulk messaging campaigns – if the rate is low over several campaigns they may disable one’s use of bulk emails. Good idea, but a little late – you can’t factor in that overall impressions and responses are diminishing because people are ignoring their messages.
Enter Microsoft. Will the acquisition have a positive effect on LinkedIn’s technology or is it the other way around? Microsoft’s acquisitions of Nokia, aQuantive, SKYPE and Yammer have yielded less than stellar results. Then there’s a philosophical divide and general lack of support for Microsoft from the Open Source community.
While LinkedIn job postings work as well as any job board, will there be a perceived bias towards companies in the Microsoft ecosystem? For now, the good news for LinkedIn and Microsoft is that they have no real competitors that offer a tool to source passive candidates – but how long can that last?
As a recruiter, I have been looking at alternatives outside of LinkedIn for some time now. I see specialized, community-oriented sites and aggregators emerging (even though their numbers are low) and sites like StackOverflow or GitHub as a place to find candidates. As these tools evolve their capabilities to find and target passive candidates where does this leave LinkedIn? Will Microsoft’s resources and LinkedIn’s leadership position reverse Microsoft’s past performance in acquisitions? Better yet, can this transaction yield true innovation and introduce a new recruiting paradigm? That is certainly the claim that executives from both companies are making. But, in the hand-to-hand combat that talent acquisition has become, I don’t have time to wait. I’ll be using all of the established and emerging tools to find the right person for my company.
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Photo: BigStock Photo
