A couple of weeks back at the 10th annual LinkedIn Talent Connect event for HR pros, recruiters, and everyone else who lives and breathes talent acquisition, LinkedIn had a big announcement.
According to SHRM, LinkedIn is combining previously separate products, including Recruiter, Talent Insights, and Jobs into a single platform, integrated with LinkedIn’s new applicant tracking systems. The whole effort is to help companies make better hiring decisions by transforming the process from simply hiring the best person for the job to an overarching hiring strategy. It’s about the bigger picture when it comes to hiring.
LinkedIn is using its unique and powerful database to create compelling solutions designed to add value to HR.
Let’s talk about that database for a minute. LinkedIn has 645 million members, and lists 20 million jobs and thousands of skills and job titles.
The Talent Insights tool uses that data to allow people to make better talent decisions by instantly seeing trends and movement across the talent marketplace, in real time. The Recruiter tool is a platform for finding, connecting with, and managing candidates quickly using that data. Jobs matches a recruiter’s needs with the most relevant candidates to quickly find that next great hire. And now, their new ATS will integrate it all.
It’s been part of an upward trajectory for LinkedIn. Recruiter was just released last year. Talent Insights not long before that. It looks like LinkedIn has a big vision for its future. And, it feels like it’s starting to flex its muscle.
When Microsoft bought LinkedIn a couple of years back, there was a lot of speculation in publications like WIRED magazine as to why. Some said it had a lot to do with getting LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, reportedly one of the nicest guys in the tech universe, onto Microsoft’s board with the goal of softening (no pun intended) Microsoft’s prickly reputation and employer brand in Silicon Valley. A kinder, gentler Microsoft, in other words.
But given LinkedIn’s active focus on putting out products that streamline, simplify, and integrate the hiring process, it seems to us that it’s about Microsoft getting into hiring.
