Reimagine Hiring – Aqui-Hiring, Lift-Outs and Purple Squirrels

by Michael George (@ReimagineHR)

I’ll bet many of you reading this have a vision of companies like Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Apple and Twitter – just to name a few – as talent magnets. Organizations, unlike yours, that don’t have to fight very hard to attract their industry’s top talent. With brands so synonymous with innovation and “cool,” the best and brightest naturally flock there, right? Well, maybe to some degree, but even those organization are in a war for talent so intense they are doing some interesting things in hiring that you are probably not (but may want to consider).

One of the things many of these companies to do is called acqui-hiring. This shouldn’t be confused with aqua-hiring, which is the practice of letting the new hires sink or swim. Acqui-hiring involves established organizations acquiring startups, not for their products, but to bring on entire teams of talented workers all at once. Most companies aren’t open about the practice, but Facebook and Yahoo! are less secretive about their acqui-hiring strategies.

Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer doesn’t try to hide the fact that she believes in using an aqcui-hiring strategy. In fact, her first acquisition after becoming CEO was of a company called Stamped, where the entire nine-person team (5 of which were ex-Google employees) were snatched up and incorporated into Yahoo’s New York mobile product team.

And Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been quoted as saying, “Facebook has not once bought a company for the company itself. We buy companies to get excellent people.”

Cloud Metrics Launches on AppExchange

by Naoki Tsukamoto (@nikes63)

Source: www.ebbinteractive.com

We are excited to announce that after being run hundreds of times, Appirio Cloud Metrics is now available on Salesforce.com’s AppExchange!  Since its debut at Dreamforce 2012, Appirio’s Cloud Metrics has already made a great impact on companies ranging from lean start-ups to global multi-nationals with multiple orgs.  Cloud Metrics is a FREE one time snapshot report of key metrics from your Salesforce org that helps you easily identify areas such as Configuration, Code, Administration, and User Adoption that may need optimization.

Cloud Metrics has become an indispensable tool for Salesforce Administrators and Architects who want a better level of awareness about what is in their Salesforce environment, especially those that have: 

• recently inherited a new org
• managed the same org for years
• become responsible for multiple orgs across multiple countries

4 Steps to Accurate Sales Forecasts

By Tom Saracene

Salesforce has become one of the fastest growing enterprise technology companies based largely on the strength of their core CRM solution. Companies are replacing their legacy CRM systems in droves for many reasons including improving sales effectiveness and better servicing customers. But, one of the biggest reasons for replacing legacy systems with Salesforce is to drive better CRM adoption and therefore get better visibility into the pipeline. Accurately forecasting not just pipeline and bookings, but revenue and profit, is increasingly important in today’s volatile business environment.

Systems like Salesforce have a significant advantage over legacy systems when it comes to forecasting. Salesforce is easy-to-use, has great mobile capabilities, and even provides social collaboration with Chatter. This means that reps have many more reasons to use Salesforce than traditional CRM systems. We find that Salesforce adoption is orders of magnitude higher than with traditional CRM systems. But, sales rep adoption is only part of the puzzle when it comes to accurate forecasting.

Jeff Epstein on Board at Appirio

By Chris Barbin

Today, Appirio announced that Jeff Epstein has joined our Board of Directors as Chair of our Audit Committee. Jeff’s financial leadership, industry contacts, and deep expertise in technology will be a tremendous asset to Appirio as we continue to grow.

Jeff is a natural fit for our Board of Directors - his personality is complementary to our already energetic group - and he boasts one of the most dynamic backgrounds of the group. From priceline.com, Kaiser Permanente and Shutterstock, Jeff has lent his financial expertise and leadership to the boards of some of the world’s most loved brands.

I could continue talk about why Jeff is joining Appirio and how he expects to complement Appirio’s leadership team, but think it is more interesting for him to tell you.

Having worked with both legacy and cloud technology providers, why did you decide to make a bet on a company that is all in with cloud?      

Bessemer Venture Partners, where I am an operating partner, has invested very successfully in cloud computing companies for more than a decade. Bessemer’s 10 Laws of Cloud Computing is a core resource for the industry. Most organizations use cloud computing to lower costs and increase agility, just as, for example, they rent office space instead of owning office buildings.

Appirio has been growing by at least 50 percent year-over-year. What is most exciting to you about joining Appirio during this stage of growth?  

I saw the Internet advertising market grow from less than $2 billion in 1998, when I was CFO of DoubleClick, to more than $37 billion in 2012. It’s exciting to be part of a company leading the way to the future, as Appirio is leading the way in cloud computing.

CloudSpokes is changing the way that Appirio approaches development and delivery. Based on what you know about our crowdsourcing community, how do you think its success will impact the wider services industry?

World-class engineers live all over the world.  Appirio’s powerful CloudSpokes community gives Appirio’s customers access to this talent to build the best products, in the fastest time, and at the lowest cost. And the competitive barriers to entry are significant.

As someone that has sat on a lot of highly visible boards, what background or lessons learned are you most excited to bring to Appirio’s board?

The ideas behind the best technology companies like Appirio are simple: recruit & train the most talented engineers and teams, build the best technology, and provide the best service to customers. The execution is hard. Appirio has proven it’s among the best cloud service providers in the world. I look forward to working with Appirio as we provide even better service, for more customers, across more technology platforms -- and as we treat each customer as if it is the most important customer in the world.

Reimagine Employee Referrals

Source: recruiter.com

By Michael George (@ReimagineHR)

In our last “Reimagine HR” post we discussed ways to reimagine your talent sourcing effort so that recruiters not only understand your organization’s current talent supply and future demand, but are also actively using cloud, mobile and social technologies in ways to uncover hidden sources of top talent and/or networks of job candidate referrers.

This week, we are going to dig a little deeper into some emerging science around the value of sourcing talent through employee referrals. That’s right, science.

It has long been accepted that hiring a new worker who is recommended by a current employee ups the chances of a good hire over a non-referred candidate. It isn’t difficult to understand why this is the case. Conventional wisdom tells us that current employees understand the company, culture and most likely the nature of the job, and often have direct work experience with the person they are recommending. This allows them to see a “fit” based on a number of factors that go beyond what’s on the job requisition or candidate resume – those intangibles that are hard to quantify but make someone successful in your company.

Customers Speak Out About “Going Google”

By David Salyers (@davesalyers)

What does real estate, modern furniture, movies and CRM software have in common? They’re all in a better place because of Google Enterprise.

Last week Appirio sponsored and helped lead the first Going Google Roadshow of the season, an invite-only event where enterprises can learn more about Google’s vision for the enterprise, including SaaS, big data analytics, cloud storage, Chrome devices and mobility. The event, held at Google’s striking San Francisco office, was in high demand, drawing more than 400 registrants from some of the biggest companies in the Bay Area.

Who Wins In The New C-Suite?: A Debate with Ray Wang and Narinder Singh

It’s no secret that we, at Appirio, have a lot of opinions about cloud computing and the future of technology in business. To engage supporters and skeptics alike we blog, tweet, write papers and do any number of things but sometimes there is no substitute for an in-person face off.

In an effort to take our opinions out of silent comment boxes and tweets, we’re setting-up a series of live debates with opinionated people who hold different, educated views and aren’t afraid to share them. We know, it’s a little old school, but oh so necessary in a world of “like” buttons and faceless avatars.

To kick off our live debate series, we asked Ray Wang, principal analyst and CEO at Constellation Research, and our own Chief Strategy Officer, Narinder Singh, to debate the evolving role of the CMO and where the CIO fits in. Digital media and data analytics are playing an increasingly important role in marketing strategies and there’s been much discussion about CMO budgets overtaking those of IT.