I recently traveled to Dallas for LinkedIn’s user conference Talent Connect. The theme was “Better Together” and I quickly understood that this tagline had a lot more meaning than what I initially thought. By the end of the first day, after a series of briefings with senior executives, I had the complete picture – LinkedIn has worked tirelessly to integrate their various solutions into a robust talent management suite! The model according to Maria Zhang, Vice President of Engineering at LinkedIn is to build a holistic solution that is based on 3 pillars: Plan, Hire and Develop.

Read on as I discuss how the various parts work together to provide you with a solution that covers Workforce Planning and Analytics, Sourcing/Recruiting and Onboarding, Employee Engagement, Performance Management and Learning and how they all work together as a holistic solution.

But first, I wanted to cover the conference and a few key points to let you see how this company has grown. This is the 10th Talent Connect and it has grown from ~200 attendees to 4,684 live attendees and  6 million views of the livestream on LinkedIn Live over the 3 day conference. I can tell you that this was one of the most energetic groups of live attendees that I have seen at any conference!

In the past 10 years, their revenue has exploded. In 2008 they were doing 78M and at the end of the recent fiscal, they achieved $6.8B up 28% year over year.

• Currently, they have 645 million members, 20 million jobs and tens of thousands of standardized skills and job titles. In the past 12 months, 4M+ members have been hired through LinkedIn which is a 32% growth from the previous year.
• They now have over 23M learning seats with LinkedIn Learning.
• Last year they announced the acquisition of Glint (a well-respected employee engagement application) which has now been integrated and they announced that LinkedIn Learning will be integrated into their Engagement product and their newly announced Performance Management product. And to show how successful this product has been, last year 5M employees engaged with Glint surveys!
• Last year they announced Talent Insights which has turned out to be the fastest growing solution for LinkedIn every with 1,500 customers since in its first year!
• Finally with all of this data, LinkedIn is investing heavily in AI to help companies make better talent decisions.

So What about the Product Integration?
Click here to see the entire keynote discussion.

John Jersin, Vice President of Product Management kicked off the discussion detailing where LinkedIn is heading at their Keynote by saying, “As we shift to a knowledge based workforce companies realize that getting the best people with the best skills is critical. We believe in the next decade that there is a shift from looking at talent as resource to a more people centric approach. We have a fundamental belief that if you solve for the growth, engagement, and happiness of your people you will naturally achieve better productivity and results. We call this people success”.



Jersin went on to say, “10 years ago, we had a single product to help you hire, but working in single siloed product experiences is no longer sufficient. You can’t know the right learning content to deploy without first understanding what people feel is missing from the organization. You can’t know the right people to hire without first planning a broader talent strategy and you can’t bring the right people onboard without first creating a culture that people want to be a part of. Our theme for this conference is better together and our vision is that these products come together in a way that helps you understand the bigger picture”.
 


So, in a nutshell, LinkedIn is connecting hiring, development, learning and engagement together. They are then placing it on top of a platform of insights and analytics. They believe that this will help you make the best talent choices. John said, “We are here to be partners to help you plan the right talent strategies (Talent Insights), hire great people (Hiring Marketplace, One Platform, Talent Hub) and develop them (Glint, LinkedIn Learning) into winning teams.”



Plan

Talent Insights: This is the starting point for a company. Talent Insights provides access to LinkedIn’s global, accurate and up-to-date data through two reports:

• With the Talent Pool report, companies will be able to precisely define and understand specific populations of talent with global insights including skills the talent has, what industries and locations they’re in, how in demand they are, what schools and degrees they have and what companies are hiring them.
• Using the Company report, companies will be able to understand their own talent at the company level and see how well they are doing in attracting and retaining talent, and develop branding and recruiting strategies to get even better.

Here are the top 5 use cases that they have seen so far:

• Sourcing strategy: see where talent is and where it’s going in order to optimize recruiting efficiency.
• Workforce planning: understand labor market trends including skill growth, relative attrition rates, and hiring demand to determine how to build and grow your teams.
• Competitive intelligence: compare your company to peers in your industry.
• Employer branding: Understand how different audiences are engaging with your employer brand.
• Geo-location decisions: quickly identify the markets with high supplies of key talent to make decisions around where to open a new office.

Click here for more detail.
This information is so powerful that LinkedIn already has 1,500 companies using this and it has only been in the market for 12 months!

Case studies to bring this to life:

• Recruiting strategies: Autodesk was looking for a new software engineering manager with 11 ‘must-have’ prerequisites, which seemed highly unrealistic. Using Talent Insights, the results came back with less than 300 candidate matches, proving the need to readjust the selection criteria. By understanding how the talent market and the competition vary, Autodesk was able to develop more effective hiring criteria based on talent pool data and hire within two weeks.
• Employer branding: Atlassian was planning to run marketing campaigns to find and target new designers and developers. Talent Insights helped them discover that there was only 1 designer for every 25 developers, which justified over-investing in targeting the designer talent pool, to better reach the hard-to-hire audience and creating campaigns, and allocate branding budget to maximize spend.
• Geolocation decisions: Microsoft was looking to recruit a number of new cybersecurity professionals to join the team but was facing a limited pool of candidates in the Seattle area. Talent Insights helped them discover a rich talent pool in another city and they shifted their plans to invest in an office where the talent ecosystem was strongest, based on the business critical skills they needed existed, and weren’t as tapped.

Hire

Hiring Marketplace: 4M people got hired on LinkedIn this year and they are making changes to increase that. This will help the job seeker and the recruiter and they claim that with the following updates, they can deliver qualified candidates in 24 minutes (not 24 hours).

• Job Alerts: One area that really stands out is helping solve the issue for job seekers where they apply to dozens of jobs and never hear anything back, no interviews and never hearing what they can do to improve their odds. Job seekers can now share their job interests with LinkedIn, job titles they would be interested in, type of work they like to do, open to remote work and more. They can then share with recruiters that they are open and set up a job alert in a single click. The job alerts function ensures that the candidate never misses out on an opportunity. These are being delivered through push notifications so job seekers get notified within minutes of a posting. LinkedIn will then show them their connections inside of the company posting the job and the job seeker can immediately reach out to their connections to learn more about the company, culture and ask for a referral. As mentioned in Jeff Weiner’s (CEO of LinkedIn) keynote, getting a referral results in a 9x better odds to land a job.
• Skill Assessments: LinkedIn is entering the skill assessment space in a large fashion. Currently they have 75 skill assessments on file and over 2M people have already taken these. They expect to have doubled the amount available and expect over 10M to have taken these. How it works is you take the assessment once, pass it, and you can post that on your profile don't have to take it every time you apply for a new job. For people who fail. LinkedIn through LinkedIn Learning will recommend relevant courses to enable the job seeker to upgrade their skills so that they can pass. Now that shows the power of integration. They believe passing just one assessment will improve the likeliness of getting a job by 30%.
• Guest Experience: People don’t need to sign in to explore, they can freely look right at the opportunities which means the talent pool will be larger than the sum of LinkedIn members.

LinkedIn Recruiter and Jobs: The vision that connecting these 2 together will greatly improve the hiring experience. They have launched 15 new features in the new platform to much applause:

• Single Pipeline: The core of this is the integration of Recruiter, Jobs and Talent Media into a single platform so that all of the jobs, candidates etc. show up in the same place so you can move quickly on the best candidates. To quote a beta client “Projects and Jobs were 2 planets who visited each other once in a while, now they live together. This is integrated, this is easier”.
• AI: By bringing together Recruiter, Jobs and Talent Media pipelines together, AI can learn from all 3 to help you make the best matches. With all of the data on LinkedIn, it is natural to create AI solutions – as Maria Zhang said so well, “Data is the fuel for AI” and LinkedIn certainly has quite a bit. She went on to say, “The more data that gets fueled into an AI engine, the more relevant, accurate and powerful the outputs are”. The simple action of someone updating their profile feeds the AI engine to learn what reasons that hiring match happened. With millions of updates in the 3 pipelines every day, LinkedIn can make predictions at scale. This results providing the recruiter with proactive information like Recommended Matches that get delivered right to the recruiter’s desktop.
• New Mobile Recruiter: It was found that 70% of candidates respond outside the hours of 7 am and 7 pm so it is critical to reduce friction to enable you to respond quickly no matter where you are. LinkedIn announced that they completely revamped the mobile app and it will be live on IOS and Android before the end of 2019. It has features such as notifications when someone responds to an InMail so that you can get back to them to continue the conversation in real-time.
• Skills Filter: In Recruiter there is now a filter that will help you tap into the pool of talent who have taken a LinkedIn skill assessment.
• Talent Insights Integration: LinkedIn found that as recruiters started to use Talent Insights in their process, they started achieving better results. They were uncovering new talent pools and consistently received higher InMail response rates. So now, LinkedIn is embedding Talent Insights directly into Recruiter. This will help recruiters set realistic expectations with hiring managers like how large the talent pool is salary expectations and much more.
• ATS Integration: LinkedIn has announced Recruiter System Connect which allow for full integration of LinkedIn data in the Recruiting System while allowing information inside your recruiting system (ATS) into LinkedIn Recruiter. LinkedIn is partnering with many of the major ATS providers on this. I saw a demo of this and it really allows the recruiter to see all relevant information in a single spot, like if this person has applied before inside your company, any notes etc. (information from the ATS is shown in Recruiter) which saves the recruiter at least 10% of their time. This allows them to be more productive and spend more time on higher value tasks. Oracle went live with their first joint customer during this announcement with many more going live in the next quarter. The vision going forward is what they call Uunified Ssearch where for example, you see in your ATS a person who passed all of the interviews but didn’t move forward while in Recruiter, it matches that same person who has now started their job search and immediately notifies you of this person as a key person to contact.

• Talent Hub: Last year they announced an ATS for companies with fewer than 1,000 employees and it is now live. This will allow you to source, manage and hire in one place. The system will allow a user to schedule interviews, post jobs to non LinkedIn job boards, provide all of the necessary job tools, collaborate with hiring managers and extend hiring offers. On its own it would be another ATS but because it is built on top of LinkedIn’s massive data pool it provides billions of data points to access. The system comes with high quality candidate recommendations as soon as it is open and then it is loaded with insights using Machine Learning to make suggestions of people that you would have never thought of; think Netflix or Spotify, the more you use it, the more it learns. The system also gets smarter with every hire that you make as it learns exactly how many candidates you will need to fill an open role and how long it will take you to do this. Finally, it provides insight into where your recruiting dollars are being spent as it will allow you to see where your candidates are coming from (be it LinkedIn or other job boards) which means it will let you measure your ROI and adjust your spending accordingly. The final announcement was that any company with fewer than 1,000 employees will get their first 12 months at no charge with a 3 year deal for a limited time.

Develop

Now that you have done the job to place a great candidate in your company, the last thing you want to do is see them leave. LinkedIn is helping solve this with the acquisition of Glint and the integration of LinkedIn Learning.

People Success: Jim Barnett VP of Product and Founder and Head of Glint spoke about the journey that LinkedIn and Glint are on to help people bring their best version of themselves to work in order for them to do their best work. The goal is to make sure people have a voice and the resources to do their job well. They want employees to feel empowered and continue to learn, develop and grow. The goal is to put people at the center of everything Glint and LinkedIn do.

Jim spoke about happiness and what makes people happy and his research concludes that people who lead a life of service to other people tend to be happier. Glint’s mission is to help people be happier and more successful at work.

They have worked with hundreds of companies to help improve engagement and create great cultures and great employee experiences. They did that by helping companies move away from the old 100 question annual employee engagement survey that nobody wants to fill out to a much more agile, continuous listening approach. In the last 12 months alone, millions of employees have received the Glint pulse surveys and over 80% have responded.
Glint gives managers the following:

• Visibility so that they can see exactly what is going on in their teams.
• Insights of what exactly they need to work on and what to do about it.
• Guidance on how to take action and how to improve.

They believe that putting people at the center of everything is the most important thing to do for business success. They have found that many of their customers tie their engagement outcomes to their business outcomes using the Glint system. As an example, United Airlines ties their engagement outcomes to important things like on-time arrivals, customer satisfaction and employee safety. He said that the system can predict which of their teams will likely have an issue in one of these areas in the coming quarter.

They also know that managers have a very large impact on their teams’ engagement levels. So over the past year they have released a suite of capabilities to help managers improve engagement levels on their teams. Manager Concierge helps managers to understand their scores and guides them into taking action and collaborating with their teams.

They believe that putting engagement at the center of everything you do is important, but helping people to do their best work is just as important. So they have seen with working with millions of employees is that engagement and performance are completely tied together. A recent Harvard Business Review report shows that 90% of leaders believe that their most engaged employees are their best performing employees.

Very few companies tie their engagement programs to their performance programs so Glint saw an opportunity to create a holistic approach to performance management that included engagement as well. As a result, they created a new product, Glint Perform:

• Agile and forward looking approach to help your people develop and grow.
• Enables for frequent and higher quality conversations between managers and their teams.
• It taps into what really motivates the employees as it is integrated with engagement.

Here are the key areas that make this unique:

• Conversations: Performance conversations are a great opportunity for feedback, reflection and growth. The problem is many people don’t know where to start so Glint provides best practice templates for managers and employees to follow and if they get stuck, Glint provides thought starters, guidance and advice embedded in the system to help them get unstuck.
• Feedback: This is another opportunity for personal growth but many people don’t want to leave the flow of work in order to give and get feedback so they have integrated it right into where people work like email and calendar. An example would be if a person had a big presentation they were sending, Glint allows them to put a request for feedback right in the invitation email. It can even provide a template so that you can get the exact feedback that you are looking for.
• Insights: Perform provides insights into how your performance management programs are working. It tells you things like what topics that are being discussed and what is biggest, smallest, and how these topics relate to things like employee engagement, performance and growth.

The product is currently in testing with hundreds of companies across all industries. Over 80% of employees in this test group have input goals into the system and 84% of conversations have been completed. The feedback is that it is easy to use and leads to higher quality conversations but the big find is that the employees participating in the test group have shown a substantial improvement in employee engagement.

Learning: Emily Poague, VP Marketing Learning discussed the importance of learning. Here are some findings on how people learn and why they learn:

• Learning is most successful when it is supported by a community that facilitates knowledge sharing and peer mentoring.
• Learning should tie to positive, immediate outcomes, if it doesn’t it is unlikely that people will keep engaging.
• Learning must meet people where they are or it simply won’t happen.

This is true in business, where sharing learning experiences and successful outcomes is a key and bringing learning to employees where they already are is critical. Learning and Development is shifting from nice to have to must have as we go through things like digital transformation, to a decreasing shelf life of skills to a shortage of knowledge workers.

More organizations are increasing their investment in learning. In their 2019 workplace learning report they found that 43% of learning and development professionals are expecting an increase in budget in 2019 which is up from 27% in 2017.

The LinkedIn Learning platform is designed to partner with your company to bring learning opportunities to your workforce.  There are now 23M subscribers on the platform which is a 2 time growth since 2017. There are now 12,000 customers of which 78% are from the Fortune 100. They feel with this type of penetration, they have gained a great understanding of how to deliver learning against the above truths.

They have introduced the following to help employees learn more effectively together:

• In addition to their course recommendations, they have added Q&A on all of their courses to the learners can ask questions and get answers from other learners, their network and the instructors.
• Recently they piloted Study Groups which enable shared learning experiences with people who have common goals. They have seen positive results from the pilot so they will be extending this to 2,000 courses over the next 30 days.
• Skills Insights has been rolled out so that companies can see where their unique skills profile, how it changes over time and how it compares to industry peers. This information will arm learning and development professionals with the knowledge of where to focus to drive the most effective outcomes.
• Their focus is to deliver learning to employees where they do their work. For example, there are now LinkedIn Learning course recommendations in your homepage feed. Glint and LinkedIn Learning offers a unique opportunity. For example, when managers receive their Glint Pulse survey results, Glint provides advice for corrective actions. In the future, relevant LinkedIn Learning courses will be offered as part of the Glint system to help them strengthen their people/manager skills. So this is relevant information delivered when it is needed in a place where people work.
• In addition, they are focused on continually adding to their catalogue of expert lead content.  Currently they have 15k courses in 7 languages and are adding 60 new courses per week.
• Their last announcement was that they are in the process of developing Learning Experience Platform for 2020. This is meant to be a single place where employees can discover and engage with all learning content relevant to them. This will include company generated content and third party content. Their vision is to extend community features like Q&A, follow internal subject matter experts and extend features like skills insights.

Conclusion
LinkedIn has truly integrated many of their products into a holistic talent management suite that is modern and different. I expect to see and hear much more in the coming 12 months but this is truly a well thought out and executed integration of LinkedIn’s core capabilities.






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