It’s always exhilarating to win an award, especially when you’re up against so many other nominees including some of the best and biggest brands in the nation. So you can imagine our excitement when Atlassian won not one but two categories in the 2012 Human Capital Magazine Australian HR Awards. Here are a few insights into why we think we won.
Best Australian Recruitment Strategy
We received the Best Australian Recruitment Strategy award for our “Europe, We’re Coming to Steal Your Geeks” campaign, a recruiting initiative we launched earlier this year to hire 15 developers in 15 days with a bus tour through four European cities. Motivated by the limited supply of software developers available in Australia, we decided to direct our recruiting focus elsewhere and draw programming talent from Europe. We kitted out a bus, conducted interviews and hosted informational evenings at local coffee shops and pubs – all with the purpose of luring highly skilled developers back to Australia’s ‘Silicon Beach’ with a job at Atlassian and an all-expenses-paid relocation package to Sydney (more details can be found here).
In the end, our campaign was a smashing success, attracting more than a thousand qualified applicants in just five weeks – more then five times the volume we’d get normally! We even made the Spanish TV news! This award makes the success of our campaign even more fulfilling, as not only did we take a novel approach, but we also entered an entirely foreign job market and succeeded.
But this certainly isn’t our first innovative HR campaign. Over the past several years, Atlassian has been known for some… well… interesting recruitment practices. In 2010, we won a stack of recruitment awards for our 32 campaign, another recruiting campaign in which we set out to hire 32 engineers using social media and ended up attracting thousands of great applicants. In 2011, we launched our unconventional Atlassian Hack House to attract University graduates.
Who knows what we’ll come up with in 2013…
Most Innovative Use of Technology
Atlassian also won the Most Innovative Use of Technology award for our MoodApp, an iPad app we developed in-house to monitor staff mood.
In many organisations, employee engagement and opinions are measured just once per year, which means that problems are usually identified too late. Additionally, these surveys are often conducted only for employer award entries, so many of the questions tend to be irrelevant for HR purposes.
Atlassian thought it would be better to keep a more constant check on the pulse of the company and ask staff for their opinions on tactical and engagement-related topics throughout the year when it’s more relevant. Hence, the MoodApp.
We recently installed iPads at the exits of all our buildings globally to survey employees about different aspects of their workday on a daily basis (the questions rotate throughout the week). Once employees enter their response, the app automatically shares the updated aggregated survey data.
This simple app is a powerful tool to gauge how our employees are feeling and what they’re thinking. And unlike other traditional employee surveys, the MoodApp provides almost instant feedback on our HR strategies. It’s like a mood ring for the whole office.
We couldn’t be more pleased to receive these awards but more importantly, we’re excited that these awards reflect the creativity, innovation and spirit of Atlassian employees.
We are always looking for people who are not satisfied with the status quo. Want to join our rapidly growing team? Click here to learn more about Atlassian’s culture, or apply for one of our openings if you’re ready to start innovating!