Talent Insights: the new LinkedIn feature that will fast-track your recruitment search

Following a long wait, LinkedIn has finally launched its Talent Insights platform, and it’s a game-changer for recruiters.
Used in the right way, this new tool has the power to help your recruitment agency identify talent hot-spots in your local area, get access to candidates you may not have considered before, and even see how your clients stack up against their main competitors.
Let’s take a closer look at how it could benefit your agency…

How does Talent Insights work?

Talent Insights is LinkedIn’s first self-serve tool for companies and recruitment agencies. It enables you to log in online and download data reports that will help your clients to make better talent choices.
LinkedIn set out to build a platform that would help recruiters to solve complex talent challenges and provide an up-to-the-minute snapshot of industry trends, whilst still being easy to use. Among the key questions it wants to help businesses tackle are what skills they are likely to need in future, where their rivals are recruiting from, and even where they should open their next office.
The platform – which has already been tested by 80 select companies – uses information from the profiles of the 575 million professionals that are listed on LinkedIn, working for more than 20 million companies. It also takes insights from over 15 million job adverts currently live on the LinkedIn network.

How can LinkedIn Talent Insights help your recruitment agency? 

To put it simply, for the first time ever you can now access all LinkedIn’s profile data in one place, and analyse it whichever way you want to help your clients recruit new employees.
There are two types of reports available on the platform: the Talent Pool Report and the Company Report. Between these two sets of data you’ll be able gain vital insights, such as: 

• Where potential candidates are located geographically, who they currently work for, and what their key skills are

• The skillsets and roles currently available within your clients’ companies compared to their biggest competitors, or the national average

• Where the fastest-growing market opportunities are in terms of location hot-spots, sectors, positions and skillsets that are in-demand. The ‘Location’ section of Talent Insights also gives you a snapshot of the countries, regions and cities with a big enough supply of talent to support your clients’ growth

• Talent flow within your clients or their competitors’ businesses; where employees came from, where they are moving on to, in which regions recruitment is focused, prominent skills, average employee education levels, and staff attrition rates
• The ‘Employer Brand’ section of the Talent Pool Report enables you to see how potential candidates are engaging with your client’s brand on LinkedIn – which links they have clicked on, how many times they have visited the company page, whether they follow your client on LinkedIn, and how many of their job adverts they have viewed

Are there any drawbacks?

Talent Insights is a self-service tool, so you’ll need to upskill your staff on how to use it – but LinkedIn has deliberately designed it to be user-friendly, so that shouldn’t be too much of a challenge.
Equally, your team will need to know what they want to search for, and be able to interpret the data they are given. However, this will help them to understand the market better, and the fact that the platform is user-controlled means that you can get the reports you want, rather than being given a generic set of information to work with.
Ultimately, the only way to see if Talent Insights can benefit your recruitment agency is to test it out, but it certainly has the potential to make searching for candidates much smarter. Not only that, but it could help you to identify roles that your clients should be recruiting for, and create new development opportunities for your business.
LinkedIn isn’t the only company helping recruitment agencies to locate talent: ETZ’s market-leading recruitment back office software can take care of operational demands, so you can focus on finding the right candidates for your clients. Book a free ETZ demo to find out more.