5 Ways To Use LinkedIn Insights To Make Smarter Talent Decisions

As a talent acquisition professional, the more you know about your available talent pool, the easier it is to find and recruit the right candidates. This is exactly why we employ sector-specific consultants here at Talentful in industries such as tech, finance and professional services.

One of the most important features included in the Talent Pool report is the ability to search for a role by location and find out where the best talent is located — sometimes uncovering hidden gems. 

For example, if you’re looking to hire a remote software developer, you’d expect to find talent concentrated in metropolitan areas such as London, New York, or Chicago. However, by searching for the top locations for developers nationally or worldwide you might find candidates in more unexpected cities — where hiring demands might also be lower. By tapping into these additional candidate pools, you can target skilled professionals who might otherwise have fallen outside of your search parameters.

Companies can also use location data for value-add projects such as opening a new office or relocating a workforce. By researching the top cities for the talent they need, they can determine the best location for a new branch.

Because LinkedIn Talent Insights provides accurate, real-time data on the talent pools available for recruiters, it can be a useful tool for managing the expectations of hiring managers or other stakeholders. For example, a LinkedIn case study describes a recruiter from Autodesk who was tasked with hiring a software engineering manager and had been given a list of 11 “must-have” prerequisites — a task she suspected was impossible.

Talent Insights showed the recruiter that there were fewer than 300 candidate matches available, which allowed her to convince her hiring manager to reduce the selection criteria — and resulted in an offer being extended to a qualified candidate within two weeks.

Recruiters can also use LinkedIn Talent Insights to demonstrate to stakeholders how many qualified candidates there are in the desired geographical area. This can help them obtain management buy-in for alternative locations and even remote hires when they’re faced with a limited candidate pool.

Both the Company and Talent Pool reports can provide you with a holistic view of trends in the labor market and help you to determine your recruitment priorities. For example, you can use the Company report to discover the fastest-growing skills, roles, and locations, both at your own company and among your competitors. 

Using these talent metrics, you can see where your company fits in with industry averages and how your workforce compares to your competitors. Once you’ve established where you’re leading the market and where you might be falling behind, you can prioritize your hiring efforts for certain skills or look to develop these in existing employees. 

You can also use the tool to assess the hiring demand in various industries, which can provide valuable insights for your sourcing goals. For example, if hiring demand is very high in the industry you’re targeting, you could consider sourcing candidates from adjacent industries where demand is lower. 

Another use for LinkedIn Talent Insights is determining the diversity of the talent pool you’re sourcing from, allowing you to make strategic decisions to widen your recruitment net and increase your chances of hiring diverse talent. As well as industry averages, you can see this information broken down for your company and your competitors using the Company report — and set meaningful targets based on the real-time data you find.

Also, assessing the median tenure for each role allows recruiters to understand movement within the current market. Identifying how long employees are likely to stay in a given role can give you valuable insights into who is most likely to engage with your outreach, allowing you to build a highly targeted shortlist (and waste less time contacting candidates who aren’t interested).

DE&I is a vital aspect of our recruitment services at Talentful. We have significant expertise in creating fairer processes and removing bias from hiring decisions, harnessing various DE&I strategies to help our partners find the best and most diverse candidates.

Lastly, LinkedIn Talent Insights provides a wealth of competitive intelligence that can help you to keep up with your competitors. You can break down searches to discover which companies are seeing the highest or lowest growth and attrition rates, which can help you to determine where to target your recruitment efforts.

For example, when you find companies with low growth and/or high attrition rates, this might indicate a lot of layoffs or an otherwise unsettled workforce, who could be more likely to engage with you.

High-growth companies and top employers, on the other hand, are pace-setters. Pulling a Company report on them can give you valuable data on where and how they’re hiring their talent. You could look into the companies they’ve successfully hired from as potential pools to target. Establishing the educational background of their junior hires can also help you to optimize your graduate schemes and internship programmes.

Thanks to LinkedIn Talent Insights, talent professionals have access to a wealth of market data and insights right at their fingertips. By implementing the strategies outlined in this post, you can adopt a more targeted approach to sourcing, effectively manage stakeholder expectations, and smash your recruitment goals in 2022.

However, while LinkedIn Talent Insights is undoubtedly a highly useful tool in its own right, it isn’t a substitute for an overarching talent management strategy. Rather, companies should see it as one tool in their arsenal of hiring approaches. 

For many businesses, effective recruitment is a tall order, even with such tools at their disposal. This is exactly why more and more are choosing to put their trust in hiring experts like Talentful to help them get the best talent on board — and for less. As part of our embedded recruitment service, we’ll seamlessly integrate with your internal talent team in order to comprehensively grasp your company’s culture, goals and hiring requirements. This allows us to refine your talent management processes so you can hire the right employees for your business.

Although onboarding an external recruitment partner may seem like an unnecessary expense, it can actually result in huge savings compared to increasing your internal team. Not only will our vast expertise help you reduce your cost per hire (CPH), but we’re much more cost-effective than traditional agencies, thanks to our no-commission policy. This motivates us to find the right employees for our partners instead of just filling roles as quickly as we can – something that reduces the overall cost of your recruitment efforts. 

Harnessing cutting-edge tools, including LinkedIn Insights, focusing on DE&I hiring, recruiting at scale and general talent mapping and management, Talentful can help transform your company’s recruitment processes.

Get in touch to find out more and start your path towards successful hiring today.