Talent Insights: Taking a Look at LinkedIn’s Latest HR Tool

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On October 4th in Nashville, LinkedIn unveiled its latest human resources product offering: LinkedIn Talent Insights. While the product is aimed at talent professionals, it will most likely impact how you, the job seeker, experience the hiring process.

Talent Insights aims to help HR departments and hiring managers better understand employment trends. It allows users to pull data about available talent pools and competing organizations on demand in real time. One of the product’s goals is to increase collaboration between hiring managers and company executives so they may create more effective hiring strategies together.

Here’s a window into how the product’s reports on talent pools might work: If a hiring manager wants to hire a new electrical engineer, they will most likely reach out to HR for assistance. The hiring manager will have many questions about the competition and the likelihood of finding the perfect engineer for the job. The new tool will enable the HR manager to provide important talent pool data to the hiring manager, including:

  1. The number of electrical engineers located nearby
  2. The number of electrical engineers who changed jobs recently
  3. The number of job openings for electrical engineers nearby
  4. How challenging it is to hire for electrical engineers

In addition to reports on available talent pools, Talent Insights will also allow companies to benchmark themselves against their competitors. HR teams can use the product to look at how many people are going to or from a particular company, the skills their competitors’ employees have, and the universities from which their competitors recruit.

As a job seeker, you may feel the impact of the changes created by Talent Insights. It may become easier for a company to find you even when you’re not looking for a job. When you’re applying, companies may be more likely to see your resume. Companies may even choose to selectively show you job postings they don’t show other candidates.

Of course, this is all just conjecture. The full impact of Talent Insights is yet to be seen. However, one thing is for sure: The internet plays a critical role in the hiring process. Be sure to make the most of sites like LinkedIn so you can win at the job search game!

A version of this article originally appeared in the Memphis Daily News. 

Angela Copeland is a career coach and CEO at her firm, Copeland Coaching.

By Angela Copeland