LinkedIn Announces Talent Pipeline: A One-Stop Solution for Linkedin Recruiters

LinkedIn, the world’s largest professional network with more than 120 million members worldwide and over 12 million in India, today announced LinkedIn Talent Pipeline, a new solution for recruiters which will give them the ability to more easily manage all of their talent leads in one place, helping them recruit the best talent more quickly. The announcement was made onstage by LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner in front of more than 1,800 recruiting professionals at the company’s Talent Connect customer event in Las Vegas, Nevada.With the rise of social media, recruiters are dealing with an increase in online networks as sources of talent who may not be actively seeking a new job. This is in addition to more traditional sources such as personal referrals, conferences, job boards and company career sites. This shift toward recruiting ‘passive’ talent gives recruiters access to a much larger pool of potential candidates with the right skills and experience than if they relied on active candidates alone. Talent Pipeline will allow recruiters to keep track of all of these potential candidates in one place, even before they enter the formal application process.

Speaking on the announcement, LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner commented, “The $85 billion global recruitment industry is undergoing a massive change. Recruiters are actively looking for more talent from more sources and managing these all their talent leads across multiple tools, where the information quickly becomes out of date. With Talent Pipeline, we’re extending our Recruiter platform and continuing our focus to connect talent with opportunity on a massive scale by providing a single place to manage these leads, wherever they are found, all powered by the LinkedIn network.”

Because most passive candidates have not formally applied for a job, they are not tracked in a company’s Applicant Tracking System (ATS). As a result, many recruiters are simply tracking leads in their own spreadsheets - a tool designed for crunching numbers, not tracking, nurturing and collaborating on recruitment.

Hari V Krishnan, County Manager at LinkedIn India commented, “Recruiters are increasingly realizing that the best talent sources are already employed and successful in their jobs – they are not hanging out on job boards or actively looking for new jobs. Talent Pipeline is a tool aimed at helping recruiters to better manage these sources and capture the right opportunities efficiently.”

Today, companies that try to create a separate database for leads spend significant time and effort to implement a new system and process, only to find they haven’t solved the problem of stale information. The moment someone changes a title, job or location, the original lead or resume is out-of-date and the database becomes less valuable. LinkedIn Talent Pipeline solves this problem:

All of their talent leads, at their fingertips, on the LinkedIn Recruiter platform. Recruiters can import leads and resumes found from other sources into Recruiter. These records can be searched, tagged with additional information, and shared across the team just like any profile sourced on LinkedIn. With new tools for adding a lead’s source and status, recruiters will be able to report on and improve the efficiency of their pipeline activities.

Stale leads are transformed into up-to-date records with deeper insights by being connected to LinkedIn. When new leads are imported, they are connected to their LinkedIn profile, which members keep updating even when they aren’t looking for a job. Recruiters are better positioned to evaluate and build relationships with leads, based on the insights provided by the LinkedIn profile, including shared connections, activity updates, recommendations and shared groups.

Because it is LinkedIn, it is an easy extension of the sourcing that recruiting teams already do on the professional network today. More than 75 of the Fortune 100 and another 6,000 companies use LinkedIn Hiring Solutions as a resource for finding, contacting, evaluating and staying in touch with leads, since they know most of their leads have profiles on LinkedIn.

LinkedIn is working closely with a number of large recruiters to develop Talent Pipeline, including PepsiCo, Pfizer, Red Hat, First Citizens Bank and Netflix.

L.J. Brock, Vice President of Global Talent Acquisition & Infrastructure at Red Hat, the world’s leading open source technology provider, commented, “Our talent acquisition strategy is based on building refined talent pools for the strategic roles essential to our business. Maintaining meaningful relationships with these candidates in a personalized but scalable manner is a priority for us. LinkedIn Talent Pipeline will allow us to do that more effectively than anything that exists today.”

Available in the first half of 2012, the core functionality of Talent Pipeline will be included as part of LinkedIn Recruiter at no additional charge. A separate version of Talent Pipeline will be available for team members not using Recruiter.