Why should you care where your employees worked before and after working for you?

In 2017, I led my first Talent Flow project at scale. We scoped it, secured HR data and completed the mapping of nearly 2,000 tech employees leveraging LinkedIn. We sought to find out exporters, i.e. companies that have been the most common sources of our hires. Secondly, we also looked to understand importers, i.e. companies that have gained talent from us. We worked with Excel in a lengthy manual process. As the second step, we categorized the companies by type (product vs. service, corporate vs. startup, freelance, academia), industry, and organizational culture (corporate vs. startup, traditional vs. agile) to enable meaningful insights.

Our findings: We hired a dozen of employees from two or three companies, but generally we really had a long tail of exporters of talents to us suggesting that our talent attraction strategy was broad and not narrowly focused on specific companies, industries, or talent pools. The importer landscape was equally fragmented with several employees leaving to embark on a freelance or academic career, which by the way confirmed that our people embraced entrepreneurialism and continues learning.

Since September 2018, LinkedIn Talent Insights (LTI) can help to get a grasp of these insights in no time. The data is presented in a table where the exporters and importers of your company are listed in the left column while the trade impact between your company and its exporters and importers is represented by the length of the bars along with the numerical values.

LTI offers a number of benefits:

·??????You get the report anytime anywhere without much manual effort.

·??????You can slice the data as per LTI filters and additionally view them by last 6, 12 and 24 months.

·?????? You can sort the data by four data points: departures, hires, ratio (departures/hires) and net change (departures – hires), both ascending and descending.

·?????? You can look up the profiles of individuals behind the numerical values.

·?????? You can in similar way analyze any of your competitors and benchmark against them. With the benchmarking you gain market insights into industry trends as well as talent demand and supply dynamics. High talent mobility between specific competitors may indicate industry-wide challenges or opportunities, such as skills shortages, emerging competitors, or shifts in market demand.

However, there are also several limitations of LTI:

·?????? The LTI data is not comprehensive or 100% accurate. The data on LTI only reflects talent that has a live and updated LinkedIn profile and this data is self-reported. The adoption of LinkedIn as a social-media platform varies from country to county so that visibility into certain pools is limited. So the data can be considered directionally accurate only.

·?????? The analysis is not sophisticated, there are no cumulated results by company type, industry or organizational culture (no data capture, fair enough). But you can download the data as an Excel file, supplement it with categorizations important to you like e.g. the company type, and pivot accordingly.

·?????? There is no historic data. There is no way to compare your talent flows over the last 24 months to the talent flows in the the previous 24 months. You have to establish a routine of downloading data at certain point in time and maintain this repository over the years.

·?????? The data for hires ignores the churn rate, i.e. that the person might have left in the evaluated period this way missing to pinpoint potential sustainability and quality of exporters. Circumventing this limitation requires substantial manual effort.

So why should you care where your employees worked before and after working for you. There are several benefits for TA and HR:

·?????? Talent Acquisition Strategy: Having transparency around the exporters allows you to identify talent pools for even more strategic targeting of your recruitment efforts. You can focus on sourcing employees of only specific companies, attend events where these employees are present, and tailor the employer branding messages to address pain points specific to these competitors. Additionally, you can also identify niche industries or specialized sectors that have untapped talent pools for you so far (e.g. big importers who you do not hire from).

·?????? Employer Branding Strategy: Having transparency around new joiners who have transitioned from reputable companies can be leveraged to tell their success stories. This is not a common practice outside of the executive level whereupon press releases feature the new joiner’s background, testimonial in respect to the opportunities and benefits of working at the new employer. Consider leveraging moves below the executive levels if you want enhance the reputation and attractiveness of your company to top talent, bolster the employer brand and attract similar candidates.

·?????? Retention Strategy: Having transparency around the importers enables you see the need to revisit and enhance retention efforts, such as improving employee engagement, career development opportunities, or compensation and benefits. Watch out for competitors known for aggressive recruitment tactics and whether or not they frequently hire away your employees.

In summary, understanding which competitors are most frequently losing and gaining talent relative to your organization provides valuable insights that can inform talent acquisition and retention strategies, market insights, and the overall competitive positioning and employer branding.

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Notes:

·?????? The article was not consulted with nor approved by LinkedIn. It is not meant as a promotion of LTI, but an objective assessment of the discussed functionality. It is solely based on my own experience since 2018.

·?????? SAP SuccessFactors has a CV Parsing feature and enables similar exporter analysis.

·?????? The SankeyMATIC image is fictional and presents an example of data visualization beyond a table.