LinkedIn Opens Up Talent Insights Tool

LinkedIn Talent Pool Report

LinkedIn Talent Pool Report

LinkedIn officially launched Talent Insights this morning, making available its first self-service analytics product. The news comes a day after Microsoft announced further integrations of LinkedIn into MS Office.

Talent Insights provides companies with access to LinkedIn’s global database of more than 575 million professionals, 20 million companies and 15 million active job listings. The idea is to help sourcers, recruiters and business leaders use LinkedIn data as they develop workforce strategies and seek the candidates needed to execute them.

Whatever’s going on under the hood, an early look at Talent Insights, which we saw this summer, showed an impressive amount of power brought to bear through a simple, logical interface. In a blog post, Talent Insights Head of Product Eric Owski said LinkedIn tested it with users at every level of about 80 companies, including people analytics leaders, talent acquisition managers and employer branding professionals.

As TechCrunch noted, Linked took nearly a year to make the product available after announcing it, in part to tweak it as feedback was received from customers.

Earlier this year, LinkedIn told us Talent Insights is the first step in its longer-term vision to incorporate more data-based insights into its talent products. If it encourages more recruiters to do their homework before reaching out to candidates, it could increase LinkedIn’s relevancy as a recruiting tool. We believe that if recruiters find it easy enough to use and leverage it sensibly, fewer candidates may be inclined to abandon LinkedIn because of a perceived onslaught of recruiting spam.

Talent insights provides data through two reports: The Talent Pool report allows users to precisely define and understand the characteristics of specific segments of talent, such as what skills they have, where they’re located, their market demand, academic background and who’s hiring them.

The Company report provides a detailed view of an employer’s existing talent so the organization can review its own performance in attracting and retaining workers and use the information to adjust their branding and recruiting strategies accordingly.

Talent Insights provides access to insights gleaned from LinkedIn’s data as it’s aggregated in real time. Like an increasing number of analytics tools, it eliminates the need for data science teams through its ease of use.

Owski shared five use cases that he said illustrate how Talent Insights can be used:

  • Sourcing Strategy: Discovering where talent is located and where it’s going in order to optimize recruiting efficiency.
  • Workforce Planning: Understanding labor market trends in areas such as skill growth, relative attrition rates and hiring demand. Such data can help companies plan how to build and grow their teams.
  • Competitive Intelligence: Businesses can compare aspects of their workforce to industry peers.
  • Employer Branding: Learning and understanding how different audiences are engaging with a company’s reputation among candidates and employees.
  • Geolocation Decisions: Helps users quickly identify the markets with high supplies of key talent, which can help in making decisions about the location of new offices or other facilities.

Separately, Microsoft is actively at work to more deeply integrate LinkedIn into Outlook and other MS Office apps, according to media reports. The Verge, for example, said Outlook will include information about a user’s contacts in calendar appointments and document sharing. Users will also be able to co-author Word, Excel and PowerPoint files with LinkedIn contacts. Previously some of these capabilities had been possible through plug-ins, but ever since purchasing the business/social network in 2015, Microsoft has pushed the idea that LinkedIn could add a lot of power to Outlook for both its users and their managers.

As ITPro noted, LinkedIn seems destined to become another of Microsoft’s native tools, much like Cortana and Skype before it.

Image: LinkedIn

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