Guest Article: The Juniper Networks approach to attracting top talent across EMEA

In this guest article, Robyn Collins, Resourcing Manager for Juniper Networks in Europe, Middle East & Africa, talks about the challenges associated with finding and attracting the very best talent across EMEA.

"Any recruitment activity must balance a candidate’s fit with the required functional skills and match the organisations’ preferred attitude and approach. At Juniper Networks we are proud to have a company culture that values integrity, mutual respect and success. Across all levels and departments there is a passion and energy that drives us and we believe that our continued success is dependent upon the selection of candidates who are the very best fit for both our functional and cultural requirements.

We’ve grown our EMEA team by over 250 people since 2006. Hiring that many people across multiple geographies and many disciplines would be a significant challenge for any organisation. Combined with our desire to hire only the very best talent, it is vital that we continue to develop and execute an efficient and innovative recruitment strategy.

We do work in a demanding industry, but when you work with people you respect and trust it is also rewarding and fun! To tap into the best sources of talent in such a competitive market, we know that we need to help candidates really understand our company, our vision and our employer brand. We wanted to help prospective employees see how rewarding it is to work here and we have developed a number of innovative ways of doing just that on our website and on YouTube (www.youtube.com/JuniperNetworks). Furthermore we are also conducting an overhaul of our career portals to align with web 2.0 and significant changes will be released over the next six months.

One of our best sources for talent is from our existing employees. We have an active referral program and we are very proud of the fact that so many staff are motivated to encourage their friends and ex-colleagues to join us.

As a leading-edge technology company, one of our particular challenges is to recruit the right sales, engineering and technical staff for our growing product and solutions set. As Juniper continues to grow, the Staffing team continues to align recruitment processes and focus with our geographically diverse client group to ensure we are providing our customers with consistent level of services and support and advice.

We continue to grow across EMEA and each stage of growth brings new challenges. With the “war” on talent and the heat from the technology sector we believe that actively encouraging new ideas from both employees and suppliers is important and we are willing to test these ideas for successful outcomes. That way we believe we can protect and enhance our employer brand, allowing us to continue to attract the very best talent.

It makes perfect sense to us to work with our suppliers in the same open and collaborative way that we work with our colleagues and customers. We have taken the approach of using specialist companies for particular markets or territories: we selected organisations that have a real depth of knowledge in their market and view our relationship with them as a long-term partnership and that has been extremely successful for us."

Robyn Collins has been at Juniper since March 2006. Prior to Juniper she worked at Microsoft, Cisco and 3Com in human resources, marketing and recruitment positions across Asia Pacific and Europe, Middle East and Africa

About Allan|Carter:

Allan|Carter is a niche recruitment partner for high-growth businesses in the Communications Technology sector, across EMEA. Our clients include the software, hardware, services and service provider communities. Allan|Carter has successfully delivered for many of the industry’s leading companies, including Juniper Networks, Intel, Fujitsu, BlackBerry and IBM. Our fast, cost-effective recruitment solutions, as well as our focus on this market, have established us as a leading company in our field. For more information please see www.allancarter.com For more information please contact: Scott Carter, Managing Director Tel. +44 (0)1344 753 330 Scott@allancarter.com

About Juniper Networks

Juniper Networks, Inc. is the leader in high-performance networking. Juniper offers a high-performance network infrastructure that creates a responsive and trusted environment for accelerating the deployment of services and applications over a single network. This fuels high-performance businesses. Additional information can be found at www.juniper.net.

Juniper Networks and the Juniper Networks logo are registered trademarks of Juniper Networks, Inc. in the United States and other countries. All other trademarks, service marks, registered trademarks, or registered service marks are the property of their respective owners.