Atlassian uses Social Media to increase job applications by 350%

16 February 2010, Sydney, Australia – In their latest recruitment campaign - 'The Atlassian 32' - Atlassian has been embracing the power of social media to find quality new employees for the company. From the campaign launch in August 2009, Atlassian saw applications more than triple with the number of applicants soaring to 2,500.

The company has almost halved recruitment costs by leveraging word of mouth marketing and use of social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. "We were able to almost halve recruitment costs becausereferralsfromstaffandexternalpeople almost tripled," says Atlassian's Head of HR Joris Lujike. "We offered a referral bonus of $2-10K for people that were hired, and it's been a huge success. This means we've also reduced the number ofstaff hired from recruitment agencies from27%of new hiresto6%of new hires."

Luijke is a believer in giving people, including current staff, a reason to talk about the company. "We offered 'talkable' incentives to people that encourages discussions on social networks – new hires were given a free holiday before they started, people could refer-a-mate and earn $2K." The campaign has seen applicants apply from from over 55countries. "We've just hired an ex-Microsoftemployeesfrom the USA working for us in Sydney" says Lujike.

Atlassian has been consistently recognised (BRW, Deloitte) as one of Australia’s fastest growing software companies. From a team of two university students Atlassian has grown to 195 employees worldwide in Sydney, San Francisco and Amsterdam. To sustain and continue this rapid rate of growth and success, Atlassian set a goal of hiring 32 people in FY10 during a time when IT companies globally were making cutbacks. Founder and co-CEO Scott Farquhar states proudly “We’ve already invested $3m in new IT jobs in Australia in the last 6 months, and expect to invest an additional $2m over the next 6 months.” Currently there are openings available for Head of Engineering, Product Managers, Build Engineers and Software Developers.

About Atlassian
Atlassian develops affordable, lightweight software that helps enterprises collaborate better. Its products include Confluence, recognised as the most widely-used enterprise wiki, and JIRA, one of the world's most popular issue trackers for IT project management. The company has more than 15,500 customers worldwide, including 30 of the world's top 50 corporations. For more information, visit: http://www.atlassian.com

For media enquiries or to organise an interview with Joris Luijke contact:
Robyn Munro, +612 9262 1443
robyn@atlassian.com