Job Seekers Discover Which People They Know Who Can Help Them Get a Job
Mountain View, CA March 17, 2004 – LinkedIn, the premier provider of professional networking tools, today announced that it has partnered with DirectEmployers to help FORTUNE 500 hiring managers and recruiters leverage referrals from their own employees to source high-quality candidates for open positions posted on their own company Web sites.
In less than ten months, LinkedIn has become the largest online professional networking tool worldwide. Currently, a new professional signs up for LinkedIn every 20 seconds, and 165,000 of LinkedIn’s 290,000 users are hiring managers who have specifically indicated an interest in hearing from job candidates who come referred to them by their trusted colleagues on LinkedIn. DirectEmployers Association is comprised of over 150 member companies such as Accenture, Hewlett-Packard, Sprint, Sun Microsystems, Honeywell, Union Pacific, America Online, and Lockheed Martin, and has partnered with LinkedIn to better serve the needs of both employers and job seekers frustrated with traditional Internet job boards.
Together, DirectEmployers and LinkedIn have created a new Web site that redefines how corporations recruit and how job seekers find jobs online. At http://directemployers.linkedin.com, job seekers can now search over 200,000 job listings directly from many of the world’s largest employers and then leverage their existing professional network to find and reach relevant company insiders to help them secure interviews and get hired.
This new Web site resulting from the partnership between LinkedIn and DirectEmployers allows hiring managers to search for candidates recommended by their colleagues — taking online recruiting for FORTUNE 500 and other leading employers to the next level by adding the proven effectiveness of employee referrals to the existing efficiencies of finding job candidates online. By leveraging employee referrals, corporate recruiters and hiring managers can avoid information overload from the typical floods of “cold” resumes resulting from listings on Internet job boards and instead focus their attention on candidates who come referred to them by their own company employees, or other trusted business contacts.
Jolene Jefferies, Director of Sourcing at Union Pacific, says the partnership will dramatically improve the effectiveness of online recruiting for FORTUNE 500 employers like Union Pacific. “This technology is very evolutionary, and has produced explosive growth in usage for professionals worldwide. Harnessing this technology to leverage employee referrals online in a proactive and structured way is exciting. With the participation of the professionals who use LinkedIn’s professional network tools, including FORTUNE 500 human resource department managers and hiring managers, this new technology will prove to be just the first step in a long-lasting and broad partnership that will change how employers reach quality professionals online.”
How it works
Job seekers search current FORTUNE 500 and other leading company job listings maintained by DirectEmployers free of charge at http://directemployers.linkedin.com. Once they find a position that looks like a good fit, they can request a referral to the human resource department or a hiring manager tapping into their own contacts who can put them in touch with company insiders for a personal introduction. Their contact request gets referred through a series of mutually trusted connections and arrives “warm” with the specific endorsement from a person the hiring manager already knows and trusts. LinkedIn mirrors the proven, real-world process of finding jobs and leverages the proven effectiveness of employee referrals to produce high-quality candidates at minimal cost to the employer.
Job seekers search current FORTUNE 500 and other leading company job listings maintained by DirectEmployers free of charge at http://directemployers.linkedin.com. Once they find a position that looks like a good fit, they can request a referral to the human resource department or a hiring manager tapping into their own contacts who can put them in touch with company insiders for a personal introduction. Their contact request gets referred through a series of mutually trusted connections and arrives “warm” with the specific endorsement from a person the hiring manager already knows and trusts. LinkedIn mirrors the proven, real-world process of finding jobs and leverages the proven effectiveness of employee referrals to produce high-quality candidates at minimal cost to the employer.
Bill Warren, executive director of DirectEmployers Association said, “LinkedIn attracts the highest caliber of professionals and offers recruiters the most effective tools for reaching highly qualified candidates. Together, LinkedIn and DirectEmployers will transform online recruiting to benefit both job seekers and the FORTUNE 500 and other leading employers who comprise DirectEmployers Association.”
LinkedIn has already facilitated over 15,000 successful referrals — half of them related to getting in touch with a hiring manager or reaching a promising candidate for an open position. LinkedIn’s CEO Reid Hoffman said, “By partnering with DirectEmployers Association, we have given our users direct access to over 200,000 existing job listings on the employment sites of hundreds of the world’s largest employers. We feel this is a far better solution than reinventing the wheel by asking employers to consider another avenue for placing job ads at a time when recruiting budgets are extremely tight. By integrating those direct employer job listings with LinkedIn’s sophisticated professional networking tools, we have made finding the right company insider and the right job easier than ever. We’re excited that DirectEmployers and its FORTUNE 500 member companies believe in our approach for enabling job seekers and employers to leverage their professional networks to find and reach one another online.”
About DirectEmployers Association:
DirectEmployers Association was formed in 2001 by a group of FORTUNE 500 companies and other leading corporations to confront a variety of issues facing Internet recruiting, including policies, practices, standards, and privacy. The association is a not-for-profit professional leadership consortium comprised of HR, employment, recruiting and diversity policy-makers from leading corporations worldwide. The association’s executive director is William Warren. Widely recognized as the founder of online recruiting, Warren was formerly president of Monster.com (Nasdaq: MNST) and founded Online Career Center (OCC), the Internet’s first employment service.
DirectEmployers Association’s member companies include an impressive group of industry leaders such as Accenture (NYSE: ACN), Allegis Group, ALLTEL Corporation (NYSE: AT), America Online (NYSE: TWX), Analysts International (Nasdaq: ANLY), AstraZeneca (NYSE: AZN), Bank One (NYSE: ONE), BAE Systems (BAESF.PK), Bausch & Lomb (NYSE: BOL), Boehringer-Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals, Boston Scientific Corporation (NYSE: BSX), Cap Gemini Ernst & Young, Cingular Wireless, Eastman Kodak (NYSE: EK), General Electric Corporation (NYSE: GE), Getronics, Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ), Hall Kinion (Nasdaq: HAKI), Honeywell (NYSE: HON), H&R Block (NYSE: HRB), IBM (NYSE: IBM), Intel (Nasdaq: INTC), Kindred Healthcare (Nasdaq: KIND), Lockheed Martin (NYSE: LMT), Motorola (NYSE: MOT), Mutual of Omaha (NYSE: MUO), Nestle USA, Inc. (OTC: NSRGY), Northrop Grumman (NYSE: NOC), Pratt & Whitney, Raytheon (NYSE: RTN), Schering-Plough (NYSE: SGP), Somerset Medical Center, Southern Company (NYSE: SO), Sprint (NYSE: FON), Sun Microsystems (Nasdaq: SUNW), Union Pacific (NYSE: UNP), Unisys Corporation (NYSE: UIS), Volt Information Sciences, Inc. (NYSE: VOL), and Xerox Corporation (NYSE: XRX). A full list of member companies may be found online at: http://www.jobcentral.com/companysearch.asp.
About LinkedIn:
LinkedIn is the premier provider of private and effective networking tools used by over a quarter million successful professionals in all industries and across the globe. By managing their existing professional network on LinkedIn, professionals can discover inside connections they never knew they had and reach the businesspeople they need to meet through referrals from people they already know and trust. LinkedIn facilitates hiring, business partnerships and access to industry experts through referrals based on strong and mutually confirmed connections. LinkedIn accelerates the business effectiveness and career success of individual professionals by allowing them to receive and seek out opportunities through their network while protecting their privacy, their inbox and their existing professional relationships. LinkedIn’s CEO Reid Hoffman was formerly EVP of PayPal, the Internet’s de-facto standard for secure, private financial transactions between individuals.
To discover which of the people you know are already “linked in” and to find out why your network is bigger than you think, please visit www.linkedin.com.
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