LinkedIn Adds New ‘Talent Insights’ to Help Employers Improve Hiring and Recruitment Efforts

Following Microsoft’s acquisition of LinkedIn, one of the key areas where you can expect to see LinkedIn improve is in data utilization.

LinkedIn, which now has more than 500 million members, has an unmatched database – they have the professional and educational histories of (almost) all of those members. That sets LinkedIn apart from other networks – while Facebook’s also trying to muscle in on LinkedIn’s turf by introducing job listings on Pages, LinkedIn’s data gives them a big advantage.

The latest development on this front is LinkedIn’s new ‘Talent Insights’, which, as described by TechCrunch, is:

“…a self-service, big data analytics product that will let recruiters make deeper queries into statistics for hiring and employment, based on LinkedIn data.”

There are two elements to the new offering, which is being launched in beta today.

The first will enable recruiters to get more data on positions they’re looking to fill – as you can see here, when you search for a job title (along with qualifying parameters for the specific skills you need), Talent Insights will provide you with a range of stats, including where people fitting this description live, which schools are producing these employees and how such candidates are engaging with your company on LinkedIn, helping to improve focus.

The information will enable recruiters to hone in their search and refine their targeting approach, helping to boost appeal to the right people for the required position.

The second element of Talent Insights looks at similar insights for your own company, highlighting rising skills requirements, role breakdowns, growth charts and more.

Both will help enhance and improve the recruitment process, utilizing LinkedIn’s ever-expanding dataset to enable smarter hiring decisions and strategies.

LinkedIn’s been moving in this direction for some time. Back in 2015, LinkedIn launched improvements to their Recruiter tool which enable recruiters to find candidates by using their existing employee profiles as templates.  

By utilizing their available data, LinkedIn’s been working to develop recruitment systems which work on more than gut feel, enabling employers to make smarter decisions based on statistical evidence – which LinkedIn is able to do because, as noted, they have such data available.

There are some questions, of course, over the validity of LinkedIn’s data – there’s no restrictions on what you can put on your LinkedIn profile (you could say you’re an astronaut and no one will stop you). But still, given the rising prevalence of companies using LinkedIn as a reference point in the hiring process, there’s an increased onus on users to be honest in their profile and provide accurate data.

With tools like these, and the added backing of Microsoft to get such initiatives off the ground, LinkedIn could become the essential platform for recruitment, the key destination which both employers and job seekers need to turn to in their process.

And given recruitment is still LinkedIn’s largest source of revenue, with some 11 million job listings on the site at any given time, it makes sense for LinkedIn to boost t