{"id":22286,"date":"2013-08-21T09:18:43","date_gmt":"2013-08-21T16:18:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.smartrecruiters.com\/blog\/?p=22286"},"modified":"2017-10-17T10:09:56","modified_gmt":"2017-10-17T17:09:56","slug":"atlassians-innovative-recruitment-campaigns","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.smartrecruiters.com\/blog\/atlassians-innovative-recruitment-campaigns\/","title":{"rendered":"Atlassian’s Innovative Recruitment Campaigns"},"content":{"rendered":"

Recently, software company Atlassian snatched up several Recruitment Awards for it’s \u201cEurope, We\u2019re Coming to Steal Your Geeks<\/a>\u201d campaign, a recruiting initiative they launched earlier this year to hire 15 developers in 15 days with a bus tour through four European cities.
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\nLast week, I caught up with Joris Luijke – Atlassian’s Global Talent & Culture Chief to get some insights. Joris has been with Atlassian for 5 years and has grown the company from 140 staff to 700 as the company’s first VP of HR and Talent. \u00a0Joris explained the campaign had been \u201ca smashing success,” attracting more than a thousand qualified applicants in just five weeks \u2013 more than five times the volume they\u2019d get normally! They even made the\u00a0Spanish TV news<\/a>!<\/p>\n

Motivated by the limited supply of software developers available in Australia – something familiar to most tech companies, they decided to direct their recruiting focus elsewhere and draw programming talent from all over Europe. They decked out a bus, conducted interviews and hosted informational meetups at local coffee shops and pubs \u2013 all with the purpose of luring highly skilled developers back to Australia\u2019s \u2018Silicon Beach\u2019 with a job at Atlassian and an all-expenses-paid relocation package<\/a> to Sydney (more details can be found\u00a0here<\/a>). I’d be convinced.<\/p>\n

Joris explained that they had a unique opportunity with the European economy not going as well. Atlassian’s day-to-day job creation progress was publicized \u00a0on Twitter<\/a>, Instagram<\/a> or people could follow the bus\u2019 progress on their landing page. Atlassian was creating jobs for people all over Europe, a noble task indeed.<\/p>\n

A couple of crucial takeaways: Atlassian realized that recruiting is, as Joris puts it, \u201ca numbers game\u201d and made efforts to generate enough buzz about its hunt to attract a large pool of talent. Using their own in-house developed coding test they were able to pinpoint the strongest candidates quickly and once it found amazing people, Atlassian didn\u2019t waste time. It offered them a job on the spot. Or they “cherry picked the best of the best,\u201d as Joris puts it.<\/p>\n

I had heard about the “Europe, We’re Coming to Steal your Geeks” campaign at SmartRecruiters’ 2013 Scale Meeting<\/a>. I reached out to Joris asking to learn about one cool campaign, I was incredibly impressed when I learned it wasn’t Atlassian’s first time using innovative recruiting strategies.<\/p>\n

Over the past several years, Atlassian has made a name for themselves not only based on their product but their creative and effective recruiting strategies. In 2011, they launched an unconventional method to attract the best and brightest University students with the\u00a0Atlassian Hack House<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In 2010, they won a stack of recruitment awards for their\u00a032 campaign<\/a>, another recruiting campaign in which we set out to hire 32 engineers using social media and ended up attracting thousands of great applicants. The company attracted massive interest by offering new hires a holiday before they even started, so they “would start their new job feeling happy and refreshed.”<\/p>\n

At the same time, they also put an interesting proposition to all recruiters. Joris explains that they allowed all recruiters to submit candidates, but according to their terms. Most importantly, they couldn\u2019t just empty their database of candidates into Atlassian\u2019s mailbox, they could only refer three. If none of those candidates was hired, Atlassian would never do business with them again. Ever! It cause a bit of a stir in the recruitment industry, but ultimately it raised the bar and it raised a lot a media interest.
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\nWords of wisdom…<\/b>
\nJoris says he and his team try to approach recruitment differently; “I\u2019ve seen companies building massive recruiting teams with marginal and increasingly diminishing success. Most recruiters use the same search tools (LinkedIn, Ads, etc.) and look in the same places (Bitbucket, Github<\/a>, etc).”<\/p>\n

Joris’\u00a0trick is to combine excellent search with a great recruitment branding strategy that makes Atlassian’s hiring messages spread as far and wide as possible. This way you\u2019ll reach those developers that would not have otherwise taken note. For Atlassian, it’s about the bigger picture.<\/p>\n

Marketing guru – Seth Godin<\/a> \u2013 explains there are tons of great idea. If you get your great idea to spread wider, you will win (even if your or idea is similar to your competitors). Joris re-defines their hiring goals. Instead of asking where and how to find 25 engineers, he asks, “How do we get every software engineer in Australia to find out about our jobs?”<\/p>\n

They realized early on that they couldn’t rely on direct search alone, nor did they have budget for large scale advertising. Or, as Joris puts it, “Obviously, merely promoting the number of job opportunities isn\u2019t going to make our hiring-message spread very far. We need a vehicle for our message to spread.”<\/p>\n

I also asked Joris what’s driving him.<\/p>\n

“My key objective is to make Atlassian the world’s best workplace. Talent and culture are the key drivers of our future success. It’s crazy to think about the fact that 70% of all the people here weren’t here two years ago. I love my job, as I get to find incredible people who feel passionate about software development, and create a culture where people feel they can deliver the best work of their careers.”<\/p>\n

To learn about Joris Luijke\u2019s other HR initiatives, check out his blog<\/a>!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Recently, software company Atlassian snatched up several Recruitment Awards for it’s \u201cEurope, We\u2019re Coming to Steal Your Geeks\u201d campaign, a recruiting initiative they launched earlier this year to hire 15 developers in 15 days with a bus tour through four European cities.","protected":false},"author":57,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"episode_type":"","audio_file":"","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"","filesize":"","date_recorded":"","explicit":"","block":"","filesize_raw":""},"categories":[838,842,61],"tags":[713],"series":[],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"episode_featured_image":false,"episode_player_image":"https:\/\/www.smartrecruiters.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/01\/Podcast-icon.jpg","download_link":false,"player_link":false,"audio_player":false,"episode_data":{"playerMode":"dark","subscribeUrls":{"apple_podcasts":{"key":"apple_podcasts","url":"https:\/\/podcasts.apple.com\/us\/podcast\/hiring-success-podcast\/id1472174987","label":"Apple Podcasts","class":"apple_podcasts","icon":"apple-podcasts.png"},"google_podcasts":{"key":"google_podcasts","url":"https:\/\/podcasts.google.com\/?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9oaXJpbmdzdWNjZXNzcG9kY2FzdC5jYXN0b3MuY29tL2hpcmluZy1zdWNjZXNzLXBvZGNhc3Q","label":"Google Podcasts","class":"google_podcasts","icon":"google-podcasts.png"},"soundcloud":{"key":"soundcloud","url":"https:\/\/soundcloud.com\/smartrecruiters\/sets\/hiring-success-podcast-1","label":"SoundCloud","class":"soundcloud","icon":"soundcloud.png"},"spotify":{"key":"spotify","url":"https:\/\/open.spotify.com\/show\/3bM8YzLjM2G9qJXLBBySaB","label":"Spotify","class":"spotify","icon":"spotify.png"}},"rssFeedUrl":"https:\/\/www.smartrecruiters.com\/blog\/feed\/podcast","embedCode":"

Atlassian’s Innovative Recruitment Campaigns<\/a><\/blockquote>