Beyond passive sourcing - the trend to shape the next decade in recruiting

This past week I had the privilege of being in Nashville, surrounded by over 3,500 of the smartest people in recruiting at Talent Connect, our annual customer event. It was my eighth Talent Connect, but this year's event was special, because what we shared represents the largest evolution in product strategy we’ve made since we started the business nearly 10 years ago.

In 2008 when we launched LinkedIn's recruiting business, “passive candidate recruiting” was the future, and it was our core value proposition to our client partners. But passive candidate sourcing is now table stakes for a modern recruiting organization.   The challenge is no longer finding 100 candidates to contact, but winning in a world where other recruiters have the same 100 names that you do.

Further, candidates are no longer just active or passive, but always on, and curious about what their next opportunity might look like. In fact, 90% of LinkedIn members say they would be open to the right opportunity, regardless of what role they’re currently in, and two out of five plan to stay in their job only two years or less.  

During the next ten years, we believe that great recruiting teams win based on two key capabilities.  First, they will have excellent recruiters with instincts to find, assess, and build relationships with exceptional candidates. Second, they will empower these excellent recruiters, and their leadership, with exceptional data and insights to reinvent and rethink each step in the recruiting process.

Using LinkedIn's data, and leveraging the latest in machine learning and artificial intelligence capabilities, LinkedIn will provide recruiters with the insights they need to focus on the right people, and give talent leaders the insights they need to make critical talent strategy decisions. That starts with our vision for Talent Intelligence.

Talent intelligence is a new way to harness data and insights to reinvent and improve every step of the recruitment process. Combining these insights with the right instincts delivers the winning talent strategy.

It’s no longer just knowing who’s done what or who lives where - that’s the old game - but having insight at your fingertips into who’s already thought about working for your company, who’s passionate about your industry, who might work well with your teams and who is open to relocating.

With over 530 million professional members, LinkedIn has become the destination for professionals to stay informed, explore career opportunities, learn skills, and leverage professional connections. With each of these interactions—every search, connect, follow, publish, like, and apply—we learn more about the person behind the profile – their passions, their interests, their readiness for change. Knowing this means we can present a compelling opportunity at the right time, and we can also build a fundamentally new way to view the labor market overall.

Talent intelligence will provide a competitive advantage at every step of the recruiting process, helping you hire the most passionate and qualified people in the shortest amount of time. It’s also the foundation of LinkedIn Talent Insights, the new self-serve analytics product we announced today that brings together all of the goodness of LinkedIn data to add intelligence to the way your company identifies and accesses talent, manages hiring expectations, and plans for what’s next.  

So what does this look like? We’ve already started infusing these insights into a number of our products today, so you can take advantage of knowing the person behind the profile - who’s qualified, who’s interested, and who’s open - to be more efficient and effective at every stage of the recruiting process. And it’s working. For example, with Open Candidates we’ve seen more than seven million members signal they are open to new opportunities, and when an InMail is sent to an Open Candidate this is twice as likely to lead to a hire compared to an InMail sent to an average member.

What’s next? Together, we can fundamentally change how recruiting happens over the next five to ten years. We’re not just talking about better reporting. We’re talking about re-wiring how effective you can be using data, and adding that to your own instincts and experience.

In this new world you can discover entirely new talent pools to recruit from, predict competitive hiring threats, and determine where you should open your next office. And this is just the beginning.

What could you achieve with those insights? I’m excited to hear your thoughts and feedback. And if you missed my keynote last week, check it out below! https://youtu.be/e7X5If40OGo