In the latest move by major enterprise software vendors to embrace social networking tools, SAP and LinkedIn have partnered to help small- and medium-sized SAP channel partners find and hire qualified talent.

As a result, LinkedIn, the popular professional social networking site, has built the LinkedIn Recruiter Starter Package for SAP's (NYSE: SAP) channel partners, who are primarily VARs (define) and integrators.

The package is based on the LinkedIn Recruiter service, which is available to anyone and starts at $25,000 per year for three seats. However, in SAP's case, the companies said a smaller, discounted solution suited its partners better, although pricing was not disclosed.

John Scola, vice president at SAP for small and midsized enterprise (SME) ecosystem expansion, told InternetNews.com that the program will help SAP grow by helping its partners do the same.

"A lot of our partners are opening up second or third offices," Scola said, adding that they've often found that hiring isn't easy -- even in today's job market. "Most of our partners have one recruiter, or half of one. Sometimes they have a recruiter who is also doing other things within the organization."

"Our partners were having a tough time finding [enterprise resource planning] consultants and the last thing we wanted our partners to struggle with was a bottleneck in talent," he added.

To solve the problem, Scola contacted LinkedIn, which has 42 million members.

"I asked them how many SAP consultants were on LinkedIn, and they found 140,000," he said.

LATEST NEWS

Microsoft's Reliability Update Triggers Crashes
Microsoft Denies Windows 7 Tied to Battery Issues
Google Wants Chinese Look-Alike to Knock It Off
Pip.io: Not Just Another Social Network?
Google Plans to Twitterize Gmail?

For LinkedIn, the move marks the first time that it's provided such an offering for a software company.

"We are excited about the partnership," Brian Frank, LinkedIn's director of sales operations and alliances, said in a statement. "Over 1,000 leading companies already depend on LinkedIn's recruiting solutions. In working with SAP, we aim to provide our members with an additional variety of interesting career opportunities in SAP's SME ecosystem."

Features

The package allows recruiters to advertise one job at a time. When qualified candidates visit LinkedIn, that job offer appears to them in the bottom, right-hand corner on the site's pages.

"It's sent to 3,000 LinkedIn members," Scola said. "At any time, they can replace the job with another one. Each job can stay up for a day, a week, a month, however long they like."

In addition to advertising to potential job seekers, recruiters also can contact prospects directly if those prospects are in their network, or they can use LinkedIn's paid e-mail service, inMail.

SAP partners get 50 free inMails each month with the LinkedIn Recruiter Starter Package, Scola said.

"At LinkedIn, they say that 50 inMails are equal to 80 regular e-mail because they only count those inMails that are read," he added.

The LinkedIn Recruiter Starter Package is aimed at SAP partners implementing SMB packages. Those include SAP Business One for companies with between 10 and 100 employees, SAP Business All-In-One for companies with between 100 and 999 employees, and those using the BusinessObjects Edge series of products for mid-sized companies.

Despite the close ties between SAP and LinkedIn, integration between the two partners remains limited: the package does not yet connect to SAP software, for instance, Scola said.

But he noted that SAP's own social networking software is in development. SAP gave a preview of the social networking software at its SAPPHIRE conference in Orlando in May 2009.

Update corrects the spelling of the name of John Scola, vice president at SAP for small and midsized enterprise (SME) ecosystem expansion.