After being launched in beta with a limited amount of recruiters last year, LinkedIn is this week officially launching its 'Talent Insights' tool, while also announcing additional functionality, making it an even more effective, helpful option for recruiters - and showcasing the capacity of LinkedIn's huge professional data set.
Talent Insights taps into LinkedIn's vast pool of career development and professional education data to provide key indicators on recruitment trends - either broad-ranging or within specific parameters - enabling businesses to make more informed and strategic HR decisions.
And those insights are powerful indeed - here's an overview of what Talent Insights can provide, and why it should be a consideration for all HR teams.
As explained by LinkedIn:
"Talent Insights is comprised of two reports, which include unique cuts of data to help you with anything from peer benchmarking and retention analysis to university recruiting."
Those two options - 'Talent Pool' or 'Company' - each provide very enticing data options to help improve your strategy.
Talent Pool Reports focus on key hiring trends within a specific sector, including broad-ranging insights into where the most people with relevant qualifications are located, who’s currently employing them and what specific skills they have.
"For example, let’s say you need to hire a product developer in the consumer goods industry. When you generate the report, you’ll see an overview that includes how many total professionals there are with a background in product development and the top cities where they live."
As you can see, the insights include the cities which have the most talent in this sector, along with data on relative growth, jobs listed on LinkedIn and how hiring demand is currently looking. That could provide some new perspective on how you hire - if your position can be outposted, for example, or you'd be willing to assist with relocation, you might be able to focus your job ads on cities with lower demand in order to attract better candidates.
Talent Pool Reports also provide insight into the top skills, and fastest growing skills, within a particular sector, or based on a chosen role, which could highlight areas you should be focusing on to keep up.
Meanwhile, you can use the Company Report to get more information on talent at both your own company and your competitors, helping inform your approach.
"For example, let’s say “Flexis” is your competitor. When you generate the Company Report, you can see an overview of Flexis’ workforce composition, talent flow, attrition, skill inventory, employee education, and more."
There's a heap of great insights here - if you're looking to keep tabs on key trends, and ensure your business is keeping up, the data provided in the Company Report is unmatched, and there's a heap of ways you can use it.
You can read more about the various data options in LinkedIn's official post on the launch.
LinkedIn is the leading platform for career insights and recruitment, with an unmatched database of education and career development information on more than 575 million professionals worldwide.
That capacity sets LinkedIn apart from potential competitors - Facebook, for example, has more user data than any company has ever had, and is itself looking to step into the job advertising and recruitment sphere. But Facebook doesn't have the same data points as LinkedIn, which means that it likely won't ever be a real competitor, at least not on the same level.
In fact, given what LinkedIn is potentially able to do with its professional insights, it will be tough for anyone to compete - which is exactly why Microsoft acquired the professional social platform for $26 billion back in 2016. The consensus then was that Microsoft would be looking to capitalize on that data, which we haven't really seen as yet. But they are slowly moving to better utilize LinkedIn's capacity in this regard.
Talent Insights moves in line with this, making better use of LinkedIn's data to separate the platform from the pack in the HR and recruitment sphere. No one will be able to even get close to the insights LinkedIn can provide on this front, which, eventually, could make LinkedIn the key platform within the sector.
Worth noting too, LinkedIn generates more revenue from recruiting solutions than any other platform function, pulling in $2 billion per annum from this element alone at last check. It makes sense for LinkedIn to be ramping up its options on this front - and for recruiters to take note of what's on offer.