LinkedIn has a ton of data — thanks to 575 million worldwide members, 20 million companies and 15 million job listings — and now it will let companies buy in to that information to learn more about themselves, their competition and the talent all of them want to attract.
LinkedIn’s newest tool, Talent Insights, lets users run detailed reports on individual companies, talent populations, skills and more. Companies have been asking for this kind of information from LinkedIn for years, said Daniel Francis, a senior product manager at LinkedIn.
“We’ve got this rich amount of information that we can provide to companies, and so we started looking at a product at the beginning of 2017,” Francis said. As it happens, that was shortly after Microsoft completed its $26 billion acquisition of the business-oriented social network.
Approximately 100 companies have been testing Talent Insights prior to the official launch, and it is now generally available. LinkedIn officials say the program has an annual subscription cost, which varies based on the customer, but wouldn’t give further price details.
Talent Insights consists of two main features: Talent Pool Report and Company Report. The Talent Pool Report includes the ability to examine groups of workers based on skills, location, job title or industry.
LinkedIn spits out intel on which areas are hotbeds for certain types of talent, who employs them, what schools they come from, salaries and more. The Company Report shows how many people a company employs in key position groups, who has left a company, where the company gets people from and which offices are growing the fastest.
In showing off the new tools for the first time, LinkedIn detailed how some of the test customers used the features, and one of them was its parent company Microsoft. Seeking to staff up in cybersecurity at the company’s Redmond HQ, Microsoft was having a hard time finding good candidates. Using the new LinkedIn tools, Microsoft discovered more cybersecurity talent closer to one of its satellite offices, so it shifted to staff up there to land those superior candidates.
