The Great Recession of the past few years may have slowed hiring down, but in the hi-tech world – did it ever really go away? No matter what the state of the economy, every company is looking for top talent in order to fuel innovation and business growth and the race is back on in full force.

According to a recent study by Bersin & Associates, talent shortages are cited as a key business challenge by more than 50 percent of business leaders. Not really a surprise – yet we are all fishing in the same pond to find that talent and while LinkedIn is a pretty big pond, how does one fishing rod stand out from another?

By making your fishing rod more appealing than anyone else’s. In other words – your brand.

This isn’t brand in the traditional sense of your logo and the colors on your website. This is about your employment value proposition and what you stand for as a company. What is also not traditional is how prospective employees find out about you. Sites like Glassdoor.com have created a forum where opinions are freely shared about the best and worst companies to work for and candidates do their research on you through social media and networking as well as looking at your website.

The company website is still an important tool, but the content that candidates are looking for has changed. Video is king. To truly get a real insight into who your leaders are, how they think, how the company positions it strategy and what “a day in the life of” this job could look like – seeing it and hearing it on video is as close as you can get to being there. Informatica recently sent out flip cameras to our offices all around the world and asked our employees to use them over the upcoming months and help tell the story of what it is like to work in the Austin office, or Paris or Tokyo. Some of these have already been posted on our Informatica Careers site on YouTube and credit goes not only to the video editing skills our employees have demonstrated but also the way they have presented the Informatica employment value proposition.

So once you have the most attractive fishing rod you should be able to better stand out in the LinkedIn pond. But what about those candidates happy under their lily pad or swimming in another pond? How do you get them to notice you?

Once again, our colleagues in marketing can teach us some tricks:

• Refining your company profile (e.g. on LinkedIn) to better describe what we do, who we are and what talent we are looking for (we call it pimping your profile which is not strictly a marketing term).
• Using SEO based tactics to ensure your name and jobs show up first in any Google search.
• Building online communities of talent based around similar interests and deploying a CRM system to manage that community and keep them informed of developments.

Not rocket science in the world of marketing, but fairly cutting edge in the world of talent acquisition. And this year the Informatica talent acquisition team  won the Excellence in Sourcing Innovation award from The Recruiting Conference Inc. and the Most Strategic Use of Technology Award at the ERE Expo 2011 Recruiting Excellence Awards  for their efforts.

Whether your pond of choice is in India, Russia, or the Silicon Valley, you need to ensure your brand is visible and appealing otherwise your fishing rod will look like any other in the water. Encouraging candidates in for a bite is just the first step of course – as any good marketer will tell you – you need to ensure that the candidate experience matches the quality of that brand. But that is another story.