Wow, what a week it was. First I went to TruLondon6, the excellent unconference (un)organised by Bill Boorman, then to LinkedIn Talent Connect and an exclusive lunch meeting with Mike Gamson, SVP Global Solutions and Ariel Eckstein, MD EMEA at LinkedIn. I have enough information to write dozens of articles but let me start with a wrap up from LinkedIn Talent Connect Europe 2012, where more than 500 of Europe’s top employers were present.

LinkedIn kick-off session

First some facts & figures:
1. New endorsement feature big succes: 10M endorsements per day
2. 2B+ Network updates are being viewed weekly
3. Mobile Applications usage has grown from 10% last year to 27% now
4. 175M global members of which 50+ Million in Europe
5. 12.000+ customers are using LinkedIn Recruiter
6. 50% of corporate customers activated Talent Pipeline

LinkedIn’s mission in a few bullet points:
– Identity, Insights, Everywhere
– Hire, Market, Sell
– From spreadsheets to Talent Pipeline

This was followed by LinkedIn executives Parker Barrile and Daniel Shapero, who gave an update on LinkedIn’s latest products.

So, what’s next?
80% of LinkedIn Corporate Recruiter Customers said, how do I tell my story to the right people? Introducing 3 new products:

1) Talent Brand Index (by Daniel Shapero)
How many people are familiar with working at Rolls-Royce / How many are interested in working
Viewing employee profiles and company page e.g. Rolls Royce 745,909 / = 16% (2 out of 7 peers)
Talent.linkedin.com/InDemand

2) Be able to view and search followers of a company (by Parker Barrile, Head of Talent Solutions Products)
→ 80% are more likely to respond to InMails.

3) Sponsor Jobs You May Be Interested In (pay per click)
→ 50% of Job Seeker Engagement and 5x Click-Through Rates of Display Ads

4) People Follow i.e. the ability to follow people like Richard Branson in a way that shows long-form content in status updates.

Passive Candidate Recruiting Success with Betfair & Centrica

The key takeaways of this session:

1. Connect your future business plans with resourcing needs (3-year resourcing plan)
2. Build a specific talent intelligence plan
3. Translate research into recruiting action
4. Get to understand your candidates

The results:

15% of hires at Centrica comes from proactive recruiting
70% of hires at Betfair comes from proactive recruiting

Next Gen Recruiting – Pipelining Talent with Siemens & Red Hat

So you’ve done the work transforming your team from a reactive department to being a proactive business partner, what’s next? Let’s talk about identifying critical talent pools, looking at talent flows and implementing a pipelining strategy that puts you truly ahead of the game and leading your business in today’s talent economy.

The power of talent pipeline; a Sales recruiting pilot program at Siemens
Siemens took a targeted approach in Pipelining profiles by mapping 3200+ Sales Execs. This was not an ad-hoc approach to fill a number of open positions but a long-term plan to attract the best sales people and hire them when the candidate is ready to make a move. A truly sales approach in recruitment! And the results after one year are astonishing; Siemens identified and hired 60% of their hires from this Talent Pipeline. Moreover, the Time-To-Fill a requisition went down from 76 to 55 days and improved candidate quality and Hiring Manager satisfaction.

Additional benefits:

1. Credibility and confidence of recruiting team grew –> Advise Hiring team, Hire confidently, reduce fishing
2. Improved real-time Market Intelligence –> Groups, Posts, Conversations
3. Opportunistic interviewing and hiring –> Collateral benefits talent scouting spotlights

Implementing LinkedIn Talent Pipeline at Red Hat
Red Hat wanted to move away from the old-school recruiting practices and implement best practices when they wanted to open up a new office in Eastern Europe (Brno). They build a dedicated sourcing team, partnered with their global Employment Brand team and increased successful hiring via referrals globally. The results are that LinkedIn is one of top sources of hire.

Key takeaways:

• Empower your recruiters to become subject matter experts
• Provide every recruiter access to LinkedIn recruiter
• Use LinkedIn to drive associate referrals
• Set team guidelines for using tools i.e. tags, candidate statuses, moving candidate to ATS, use of reminder feature

Driving successful transformation by SAP

Susan Bor, Senior VP of Talent Acquisition, at SAP told about her journey to date that has seen her manage a high performing recruiting team who have successfully reduced cost and time to hire and is now taking the next step, implementing tactics and a long term strategy that is focused on quality of hire.

This journey started in 2010 after a big reduction of Talent Acquisition (TA) staff in 2009, declined revenue in Q1-2010 and the TA function that was not connected and not delivering the numbers for the business (and acting as individuals, not as a team).

Next challenge for Susan is to measure the Quality of Hire as this is truly the one and only metric that matters in recruiting!

Recruitment 3.0, 4.0 & 5.0: Inside the Autodesk Story

Matthew Jeffery of Autodesk published several widely popular and discussed recruitment articles: “A Vision for the Future of Recruitment: Recruitment 3.0” and “Recruitment 4.0: Crowdsourcing; Gamification; Recruitment as a Profit Centre and… the Death of Recruitment Agencies.” Their impact is still being felt throughout the industry today.

In this keynote, Matthew shared an exclusive look at the conclusion of his research: “What is Recruitment 5.0: The Final Chapter of Recruitment“. About Autodesk’s use of social media, the cutting edge mobile recruitment app (coming soon), new corporate careers website and disruptive recruitment marketing practices… What a great show and appearance this was!

Here’s the recording from Talent Connect Las Vegas, with the same presentation, a few weeks earlier:

And lots more…

I really enjoyed listening to all the casus studies of the, above mentioned, big corporate organisations who presented at Talent Connect. What was striking that all these organisations started in the past 1-2 years implementing a sourcing strategy. I think that is great news and something I’ve been advocating since a long time and written down in my book “Recruitment via LinkedIn” (first released in 2008). It’s not an easy task when working as a Recruiting Manager at a large corporate organisation! The results were all very compelling and these organisations deserved a podium. The only downside is that all these stories sound the same and it would have been nice when the diversity of organisations (and stories) was bigger.

Surprising, or perhaps not, was the low number of Tweets about #intalent during the day. Could it be that most Corporate HR and Recruiters have not embraced Twitter yet?

I loved the entrance (see picture above), the wide choice of sessions, the photo booth to pimp your profile, the LinkedIn branded sweets, free food and drinks, video interview room, and the after party at London’s famous Roof Gardens club.

Last but not least, I had the opportunity to became Certified as LinkedIn Recruiter Expert! With this recognition, I joined a group exclusively for LinkedIn Corporate Recruiter license holders who have completed the LinkedIn Corporate Recruiter Expert Program.

These are my takeaways. Talent Connect 2012 was a really exciting, excellent organised and informative event. I’m looking forward to join again in 2013!

UPDATE: 5 November 2012 with Powerpoint presentations