LinkedIn's business valuewas
highlighted when Microsoft asked a member of its IT recruitment
staff to put together a team to reverse-engineer
viruses.
Microsoft saved an estimated £60,000 and was able to source
candidates with specialistIT skills from across Europe.
Declan Fitzgerald, IT recruiter at Microsoft, said he had to
find nine techies with skills in the rare
Assembly
and X86 software languages.
He said through normal methods such as advertising and
recruitment firms he would have struggled to find people with these
niche skills. But through LinkedIn searches he filled seven out of
nine positions.
"These are quite unusual skills which are used to protect
hardware," said Fitzgerald."We get attacked, soabout 18 months ago
we decided to create a team that can continually reverse-engineer
viruses."
"We knew we would have to look across Europe to find these
people, and LinkedIn allowed us to contact people in Finland and
Romania where the recruits came from."
He said the £60,000 saved was in direct recruitment company
fees.
Simon Kelly, director for corporate solutions Europe at
LinkedIn, said the social media site gets one million new members
every 17 days. It has 10 million members in Europe.
He said Indian IT supplier HCL has been using LinkedIn to
recruit and has saved £300,000 in recruitment fees in a year,
andbrewer SAB Miller saved £1.2m in a year in recruitment fees by
employing 120 people directly from LinkedIn.