Bersin Study

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CASE

STUDY

FOCUS:

TALENT

ACQUISITION

MPLOYMENT

BRANDING

SOURCING &

RECRUITING

SCREENING &

NTERVIEWING

HIRING &

ONBOARDING

TALENT

ACQUISITION

STRATEGY

TALENT

ACQUISITION

TECHNOLOGY

PREHIRE

ASSESSMENT

Copyright 2014 Deloitte Development LLC. All rights reserved.

This material is licensed to Gild, Inc., for distribution only.

Using Data-Driven Alternative

Sourcing Solutions to FindHigh-Tech Talent

How Red Hats Talent Acquisition Team Leverages NewHigh-Tech Tools to Identify Highly Skilled Global Candidates

Robin Erickson,Ph.D., Vice President, Talent Acquisition ResearcBersin by Deloitte, Deloitte Consulting LLP

January 20

Identifying highly skilled talent is essential for any organization doing

business in todays competitive global marketplace and is particularly

critical for companies in the IT sector that are searching the globe

for software engineers and developers with the right skills. This is

certainly the case for Red Hat, an open source software company thatdevelops software products and technology solutions for enterprise

clients around the world. Founded in 1993, Red Hat was the first

company to make the open source operating system Linux into an

enterprise-class, commercially viable solution.1In the past, Red Hats

legacy as a pioneer in the field gave it clear advantages in the hiring

market; in fact, the company is an employer of choice for specialized,

open source software engineers. However, the competition for open

source experts has now become increasingly intense.

In this case study, we:

Examine how Red Hat has used an array of tools to identify andacquire talent, with an emphasis in recent years on social sourcing

Explore how and why Red Hat has sought to gain a competitive

advantage by supplementing its social sourcing efforts with an

analytical sourcing approach that goes beyond social networks

IN THIS CASE STUDY

1 Source: Red Hat history, Redhat.com, 2014, www.redhat.com/about/

company/history.html.
http://www.redhat.com/about/company/history.htmlhttp://www.redhat.com/about/company/history.htmlhttp://www.redhat.com/about/company/history.htmlhttp://www.redhat.com/about/company/history.html


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USING DATA-DRIVEN ALTERNATIVE SOURCING SOLUTIONS

TO FIND HIGH-TECH TALENT

Copyright 2014 Deloitte Development LLC. All r ights reserved.

This material is licensed to Gild, Inc., for d istribution only.

The Bersin WhatWorks MembershipProgram

This document is part of the Bersin Research Library. Our research is provided

exclusively to organizational members of the Bersin Research Program. Member

organizations have access to an extensive library of learning and talent

management related research. In addition, members also receive a variety

of products and services to enable talent-related transformation within their

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BenchmarkingThese services cover a wide spectrum of HR and L&D

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for benchmarking, vendor and system selection, program design, program

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Strategic Advisory ServicesExpert support for custom-tailored projects.

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leading practices.

IMPACTConference: The Business Of TalentAttendance at special

sessions of our annual IMPACTconference.

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on a wide range of topics to educate, inform, and inspire HR and L&D

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For more information about our membership program, please visit us at

www.bersin.com/membership.
http://www.bersin.com/membershiphttp://www.bersin.com/membership


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Contents

Company Overview 5

Business Environment and Challenges 6

HR Organization 6

New Tools for an Evolving Employment Marketplace 7

Red Hats Outbound and Inbound Social Recruiting Tools 8

Piloting a Data-Driven Sourcing Solution 10

Driving Efficiency 12

Holistic Views of Candidates 13

Making Red Hat Relevant with Candidates 13

The Pilot Phase Ends 14

Business Impact 14

Lessons Learned and Leading Practices 15

Next Steps 16

Conclusion 16

Appendix I: Topics for Discussion and Learning 18

Key Learnings 18

Ideas for Action 18

Questions to Consider 19

Appendix II: Table of Figures 20

About Us 21


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Company Overview

Red Hat is one of the worlds leading providers of open source information

technology solutions. Founded in 1993 (see Figure 1), the company made

its name by bringing a free, open source platform known as Linux into themainstream enterprise data center market. Few expected that Linuxor Red

Hatcould compete against established operating systems produced by the

industrys dominant players. Today, Red Hat Enterprise Linux powers more

than half of the worlds financial trading volume2, and open source software

is the backbone of many companies IT infrastructures. The Red Hat product

portfolio has grown to include open source solutions for cloud, storage,

middleware, and virtualization applications.

While Red Hat was the first successful open source software solutions

company, it now competes against some of the biggest technology

companies in the world. In 2012, Red Hat became the first company focused

exclusively on open source software and solutions to hit $1 billion in annualrevenues.3It is estimated that more than 90 percent of the Fortune 500 use

at least one Red Hat product or software solution.4

Headquartered in Raleigh, North Carolina, Red Hat employs approximately

5,900 people around the world. Approximately 900 of those employees

work in Raleigh, but reflecting the global nature of its business, Red Hat

has more than 80 offices in 35 countries around the world and employees in

Tullahoma, Tennessee; Beijing, China; Pune, India; Brno, Czech Republic; and

Sao Paolo, Brazil, to name a few.

2 Source: Red Hat Enterprise Linux Powers the Globes Stock Exchanges, Red Hat,

March 23, 2012, www.redhat.com/about/news/archive/2012/3/red-hat-enterprise-

linux-powers-the-globes-stock-exchanges.3 Source: Red Hat: The first billion dollar Linux company has arrived, ZDNet.com /

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, March 28, 2012, www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/red-

hat-the-first-billion-dollar-linux-company-has-arrived/10692.4 Source: Products and Services, redhat.com, 2013, www.redhat.com/overview/

products-and-services/.5 Source: Red Hat Reports Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2013 Results,

redhat.com, March 27, 2013, http://investors.redhat.com/releasedetail.

cfm?ReleaseID=751668.

Figure 1:Red Hat at a Glance

Year Founded: 1993

Employees Worldwide:5,900

Fiscal 2013 Revenue:$1.33 billion5

World Headquarters:Raleigh, North Carolina

Stock Symbol:RHT (NYSE)

Source:Red Hat, 2013.
http://www.redhat.com/about/news/archive/2012/3/red-hat-enterprise-linux-powers-the-globes-stock-exchangeshttp://www.redhat.com/about/news/archive/2012/3/red-hat-enterprise-linux-powers-the-globes-stock-exchangeshttp://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/red-hat-the-first-billion-dollar-linux-company-has-arrived/10692http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/red-hat-the-first-billion-dollar-linux-company-has-arrived/10692http://www.redhat.com/overview/products-and-services/http://www.redhat.com/overview/products-and-services/http://investors.redhat.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=751668http://investors.redhat.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=751668http://investors.redhat.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=751668http://investors.redhat.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=751668http://www.redhat.com/overview/products-and-services/http://www.redhat.com/overview/products-and-services/http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/red-hat-the-first-billion-dollar-linux-company-has-arrived/10692http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/red-hat-the-first-billion-dollar-linux-company-has-arrived/10692http://www.redhat.com/about/news/archive/2012/3/red-hat-enterprise-linux-powers-the-globes-stock-exchangeshttp://www.redhat.com/about/news/archive/2012/3/red-hat-enterprise-linux-powers-the-globes-stock-exchanges


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Business Environment and Challenges

While Red Hat has established itself as the leader in the open source

software field, its competitors are increasingly prevalent, leading to

significant global competition for the highly skilled talent the company

pursues. This problem is common throughout the high-tech field; the

technology unemployment rate in the United States is just 3.6 percent,

compared to 7.6 percent for the economy as a whole.6

Red Hats ability to acquire excellent talent is a key factor in its success and

also a part of the companys history. Red Hat was both an early user of

web-based employment marketplaces and job boards and an aggressive

and early adopter of social recruiting tools. As the organization has grown

and competition has become more intense, the company has explored other

advantages and resources to identify and hire talent. According to the

companys vice president of talent acquisition and infrastructure:

Weve never had the problem of too few applications

coming in the door. Our challenges are the scarcity

of candidates with the right skills and steep

competition for the top talent among employers.

HR Organization

Red Hats HR organization operates on a business partner / centers ofexcellence (CoE) model. These CoEs include talent acquisition; compensation,

benefits, and mobility; learning and development; HR operations; and

people, performance, and engagement. Additionally, each geographic

region has its own dedicated HR business partners, as well as HR generalists

(see Figure 2). Those HR business partners and generalists report to the HR

leader in each region.

In the case of Red Hats talent acquisition function, regionally based

employees report directly to the talent acquisition CoE, with a dotted line

connection to the HR leader in their region. For example, a talent acquisition

specialist based in Tokyo works directly with hiring managers, businessleaders, and HR business partners in their region, but reports directly to the

head of the talent acquisition CoE in Raleigh, North Carolina.

6 Source: Tech unemployment rate sees slight uptick, Boston Business Journal/

Patricia Resende, July 12, 2013, www.bizjournals.com/boston/blog/techflash/2013/07/

tech-unemployment-rate-sees-slight.html.
http://www.bizjournals.com/boston/blog/techflash/2013/07/tech-unemployment-rate-sees-slight.htmlhttp://www.bizjournals.com/boston/blog/techflash/2013/07/tech-unemployment-rate-sees-slight.htmlhttp://www.bizjournals.com/boston/blog/techflash/2013/07/tech-unemployment-rate-sees-slight.htmlhttp://www.bizjournals.com/boston/blog/techflash/2013/07/tech-unemployment-rate-sees-slight.html


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This active online community also enables Red Hats employeesRed

Hatters, as they are knownto actively engage with potential hires.

We look at our 5,900 associates as recruiters, says the companys vice

president of talent acquisition and infrastructure. The companys employee

referral program, called Red Hat Ambassadors, is a tiered reward system in

which eligible employees can receive cash bonuses, T-shirts, stickers, hoodies,and other rewards for every new hire they bring in. Red Hatters who refer

five employees are bestowed with the title Ultimate Ambassador. These

employees earn two cash bonuses, as well as other Red Hatbranded

memorabilia and a slot on the companys Red Hat Ambassador Advisory

Board.8Additionally, referrals that come from these Ultimate Ambassadors

get priority treatment from the companys talent acquisition team. The

program has resonated with employees, and in 2013 more than half of all

new Red Hat hires came in through employee referrals.

Red Hats Outbound and InboundSocial Recruiting Tools

Red Hats talent acquisition team has an employment-branding group

that focuses exclusively on outreachposting updates about the company

on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social networks (see Figure 3).

The second social media group within talent acquisition, called the social

delivery team, takes leads that come in from social media and turns them

into candidates.

When the company is trying to find candidates who will be able to handle

very specific types of issues, the social delivery team monitors related

questions on various message boards and then searches for qualified

candidates among those who post answers. While U.S.-based forums are

popular for these types of questions, the organization also uses social

networks that are widely used in particular regions. Xing, for example, is a

professional social network popular in Germany that Red Hat uses to post

questions and identify talent.

Red Hat was an early adopter of LinkedIns Recruiter tool,9a resource that

helped the company transition away from the job boards and sourcing firms

that characterized its recruitment efforts during the early- to mid-2000s.

8 Source: Red Hat Ambassadors, YouTube.com, August 29, 2012, http://youtu.be/

JbvPSbKqxbQ.9 For more information, Using Social Networks: How Global Recruiting Tools Help

Attract Top Talent, Bersin & Associates / Katherine Jones, Ph.D., September 2011.

Available to research members at www.bersin.com/library.

The Red Hat

Ambassador

program turns the

companys 5,900

employees into

recruiters. In 2013,

more than half of

all new hires at

Red Hat came from

employee referrals.

KEY POINT
http://youtu.be/JbvPSbKqxbQhttp://youtu.be/JbvPSbKqxbQhttp://www.bersin.com/libraryhttp://www.bersin.com/libraryhttp://youtu.be/JbvPSbKqxbQhttp://youtu.be/JbvPSbKqxbQ


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Source:LinkedIn, 2013.

Figure 3:Red Hats LinkedIn Page


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To test this data-driven sourcing approach, the Red Hat team devised

a sample problem for Gild to solve. Red Hat gave the solution provider

approximately 100 blinded names from its own database of employees and

candidates and asked it to rank those people. The solution provider returned

with the results, and Red Hat then cross-referenced those rankings against

its own pieced-together profiles. Many of the very highest scorers on thesolution providers assessment were actually working at Red Hat, having very

successful and productive careers. This suggested to Red Hat that a yearlong

pilot with Gilds software was worth pursuing.

Red Hat secured software licenses for its entire talent acquisition team

which, in hindsight, was more than the company required. While adoption

increased over the course of the year, heavy usage was confined to less than

half of the team.

In that first pilot year, we didnt need a license for the

entire organization. Lesson learned for us on pilots: startsmall and then expand usage as adoption increases.

Vice president of talent acquisition

and infrastructure, Red Hat

Driving Efficiency

One of the challenges for Red Hats recruiters is determining where to

devote their energy on a daily basis. Should they start by scouring social

media sites? Should they check in with open source online forums? Or should

they follow other leads for prospective candidates? The new platform did

not necessarily change the order of this daily routine. In fact, HR leaders at

the company did not insist on any specific rules for how, when, or if talent

acquisition strategists used the tool, preferring to let each strategist choose

how to leverage it into his or her individual processes.

Here is a typical example of how a talent acquisition strategist used the

platform during the pilot. Strategists would start their day searching

keywords and profiles on social networks to identify candidates. Next, the

strategists would use the recruiter tool to scan online job profiles for the

names found during the keyword search. This might generate a lead list of50 potential candidates.

Not all 50 candidates are the same, though. And

the trick for our team is to figure out who the best

candidates are from a pool of 50 or 60 leads.

Vice president of talent acquisition

and infrastructure, Red Hat

When piloting a

program, start with

a small team of

users, instead of

rolling out across

an entire global

organization.

KEY POINT


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By supplementing these social-sourcing tools with the new platform and its

scoring feature, a talent acquisition specialist is able to narrow his or her list

down. Instead of reaching out to 50 candidates, for example, the recruiter

can quickly focus on the 5 or 6 top leads.

[The Gild platform] made me a lot more efficient.I could quickly zone in on the top candidates in Europe

and fairly easily begin to learn a whole lot more about

them through the publicly available data that the

platform is able to search.

Red Hat talent acquisition strategist,

Brno, Czech Republic

Holistic Views of Candidates

Some candidates are expert at updating their skills and qualifications on

professionally focused social network sites, which makes them relatively easy

for recruiters to find. However, Red Hats recruiters have discovered that

some of the best candidates have very skeletal online profiles, and those

profiles often do not accurately reflect their skill level or knowledge. Also,

some of these programmers and engineers, while quiet on the most popular

social networks, may be very active on specialized sites where programmers

share and discuss new code.

The new data-driven program scans these specialized sites, retrieving profiles

and relevant postings in order to give recruiters a more comprehensive viewof candidates. Additionally, coders often embed contact information in the

code that they post for review on these specialized sites and forums. The

solution provider platform is able to extract this information as well.

Making Red Hat Relevant with Candidates

While Red Hats recruiters already have paid access to the most popular

professional social networks, the Gild platform also searches more than

60 social networks around the world, as well as blog posts and personal

websites. This automated access gives Red Hats recruiters a more completepicture of prospects before they ever reach out to them directly.

This expansive social search function allows recruiters to make contact with

prospects by identifying shared connections. It also gives Red Hats recruiters

an opportunity to see if prospects already have an existing connection

within the organization. For example, a candidate may have worked or

gone to school with a current Red Hat employee. The expansive social search

By combining the

new data-driven

platform with

existing solutions

and tools,

talent acquisition

strategists were

able to quickly

target a small

group of 5 or 6

candidates, asopposed to

50 or 60.

KEY POINT


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infrastructure of over 90 percent of the Fortune 500. This growth on the

companys business side has led to a critical need for highly skilled software

engineers and programmers.

During fiscal year 2013, Red Hat had 1,100 new external hires, a number

that does not include internal promotions or transfers. Long a pioneer inidentifying and recruiting top talent, Red Hats talent acquisition team

members are skilled in using online social networks to identify talent. The

companys own social networkits 5,900 employeesaccounts for more than

50 percent of new hires, via employee referrals. Yet despite Red Hats strong

sources of high-quality candidates, the company realized that it might be

overlooking candidates who do not have a large and vocal online presence.

To address this concern, the company undertook a yearlong pilot program

using a software platform that scours data from across multiple Internet

sites, social networks, blogs, online forums, personal web pages, and

more. The platform also applies a ranking system to evaluate software

programmers and engineers.

Having this more holistic picture of candidates allowed Red Hat recruiters to

zero in on the more skilled candidates out of a large group. It also enabled

them to glean information about candidates, including their interests and

passions. This functionality gave recruiters the ability to target and tailor

their outreach to specific candidates. While the company did not collect

data on improved efficiency, an informal survey of employees who used the

platform suggested that it dramatically enhanced their ability to do their job

and made them more productive.

Convinced, Red Hat renewed its contract and is now planning a morecomprehensive rollout of this new tool across its talent acquisition network.

Next year, alongside this rollout, the company also plans to implement

its own internal data project to measure the quality of its hires and to

determine which of its varied sourcing methods has the most impact.


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2. Ask your solution provider if it is prepared to lead engagement

initiatives with your employees, which will speed adoption. Nobody

understands the capabilities of new software like its creators.

3. Devise a test for a solution provider to perform. Even before signing on

for a trial period, Red Hat asked the solution provider to rank a blindedlist of candidates. The solution providers rankings corresponded to Red

Hats findings about the same candidates, proving to the company that

undertaking a pilot program would be worthwhile.

Questions to Consider

Below is a list of discussion questions that you can ask your team, colleagues,

and business leaders to help you take the next steps:

1. How will different parts of your organization respond to the idea of

using a new tool if the existing process does not appear to be broken?

You may encounter resistance, making internal engagement and change-

management programs essential.

2. If you are a global organization, will your entire international team be

able to use the solution? Consider rolling out the program in one region

first before attempting wider implementation.

3. Is your team currently using various data and information streams?

Does your organization have an efficient way to manage these multiple

channels? And would such a system be useful to your team?


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Figure 1:Red Hat at a Glance 5

Figure 2:Red Hat HR Organization Structure 7

Figure 3:Red Hats LinkedIn Page 9

Figure 4:The Talent Score 11

Appendix II: Table of Figures


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