It’s fair to say that if you work in Talent Acquisition, then Linkedin plays a big part in your working life. Understanding how LinkedIn view the future of both their product and of recruiting in general is something I know most of you will be very interested in.
Very happy to say that my guest this week is John Jersin, Head of Product for LinkedIn Talent Solutions
In the interview we discuss:
- How LinkedIn has evolved in the last few years
- How technology is helping companies be smarter about who and how they hire
- Using AI to predict talent retention
- The capability of LinkedIn’s new Talent Insights product
- The future role of recruiters in the face of advancing technology
- Will LinkedIn finally replace the resume?
Jon also shares LinkedIn plans for the rest of 2018 and gives us his view on the longer term future for talent acquisition.
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Free Future Of Corporate Careers Sites Whitepaper
Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
Just before we start the show this week, a quick announcement to tell you that I’ve just published a free white paper on the future of corporate career sites. The very first digital marketing project I worked on was building a careers website back in 1999. And I’ve always been frustrated that the level of sophistication of careers websites hasn’t moved on much since then, particularly when you consider the advances made in other areas of talent acquisition. The white paper is based on extensive research, looks at the important role of careers websites, examines what’s been holding them back, and walks through a new model which is finally helping them to evolve. You can access the white paper instantly, no need to register or surrender your email address@www.careerswebsiteguide.com future. That’s www.careers website guide.com future.
Matt Alder [00:01:16]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome. And episode 127 of the recruiting Future podcast. It’s fair to say that if you’re in talent acquisition, then LinkedIn plays a very big part in your working Life. Understanding how LinkedIn view the future, both of their product and of recruiting in general, is something that I know most of you will be very interested in. So with that in mind, I’m delighted that my guest this week is John Jersin, Head of product for LinkedIn Talent Solutions. Enjoy the interview.
Matt Alder [00:01:52]:
Hi, John, and welcome to the podcast.
John Jersin [00:01:54]:
Thanks so much, Matt. I’m really excited to be here.
Matt Alder [00:01:57]:
My absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Could you just introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do?
John Jersin [00:02:03]:
Yeah, absolutely. My name’s John Jersin and I’ve been working on recruiting technology for a number of years now. In my current role, I’m the head of the product organization at LinkedIn Talent Solutions, which includes all of the products at Linked Sales to companies to help them hire, such as LinkedIn Recruiter, which is our flagship search product, allows you to discover talent throughout the LinkedIn network, as well as our jobs product that allows you to post jobs and will match those jobs to talent on LinkedIn, as well as a number of media products that will help you build out your talent brand.
Matt Alder [00:02:39]:
Obviously, lots of changes at LinkedIn in the last few years. How has LinkedIn evolved since you’ve been with the company?
John Jersin [00:02:45]:
It’s a great question. You know, I’ve been at the company for a couple of years now and I’ve seen some pretty interesting changes. I’ll Call out just a couple of them. I think LinkedIn as a broader platform has made the jump from kind of an older style social network to one that’s enabled a lot of real time experiences on the platform. I think that’s a particularly interesting change. Consumers today are expecting more and more real time communication when they’re being social online. And by lighting up some experiences like that, I think we’ve continued to meet expectations of consumers in a way that frankly not all social products have. So I’m very excited that we’ve made that change as a broader platform. LinkedIn Talent Solutions, I think made a couple of very interesting changes over the last few years also in particular, we used to not want to be identified as a jobs platform. We wanted to be seen as very different from older style job boards. But over the last few years we’ve actually added a huge number of jobs on our platform. We have well over 10 million jobs on the platform now. And we’re very excited that we’re building a very active group of job seekers on the platform and have a very healthy ecosystem there. There’s another very exciting change that I think has a little bit more to do with the topic today around AI, in that our products a couple years ago actually thought about giving value to our customers by driving more engagement with them. So for example, our recruiter, the way that we thought about driving value in that product was by showing people that recruiters would want to contact at the top of search results without much regard for whether those people wanted to hear about the opportunity on the table. We’ve changed that in a big way. We now focus directly on who’s most likely to actually get that job. That’s sometimes very different from the person that you’d want to reach out to in the first place. They’re not necessarily the same candidate for every job anymore. And by optimizing for who’s actually going to get that job, we’ve driven up in mail response rates considerably. As an example, you know, they started when I started here, around 19% around there. They’re pretty close to 36% now. And it’s all because we’re helping recruiters message people who want to hear from them and are also very qualified. So that bidirectional interest, I think that’s one of the most interesting changes that we’ve made over the last few years.
Matt Alder [00:05:27]:
Absolutely. And perhaps sort of dig a bit deeper into that. I mean, lots and lots of changes in recruitment technology and the way that companies are working. I mean, how’s technology helping Companies be smarter about who and how they hire?
John Jersin [00:05:42]:
Yeah, I think that’s a great question. There’s a lot going on today, and companies are trying a lot of things, especially as it pertains to AI. So I’ll talk a little bit about what they’re trying, and then I’ll talk about what I think works and doesn’t work. There are companies that are trying to optimize, for example, how they hire or optimize who they bring on to ensure kind of the highest performance. Once people come on, they’re also trying to optimize retention. So hiring people who are more likely to stay a long time. And it turns out that I think some of these things work pretty well and some don’t look as promising. So I’ll give you one example, just retention. To pick on one of those three, it’s a little bit of a different structure of problem than the other two in that to find out what happens in terms of employee retention, you have to wait years, Right. Because most employees will work at a company for a couple of years or so. And to find out exactly how long, you have to wait that long, and you have to wait that long for the data to become available. Now, all of these algorithms, all the AI that people are trying to build into their process to accomplish these goals of hiring, improving performance, improving retention, it all takes data. And in cases like retention, where it can take years before you kind of get the data back about what actually happened, you can just see a lower cycle of innovation. It’s a little bit slower in that area. I think we’re much more optimistic about AI as a way to improve how effectively you’re hiring, how efficiently you’re hiring, and a little bit about how to make sure that those people that you’re bringing on board are going to be like the top performers that you have today and perform really well. So I think those are some interesting examples.
Matt Alder [00:07:37]:
Absolutely. And I think there are some really interesting things that AI can do and data can do in the recruitment. In the recruitment process. So we’re beginning to see sort of more companies use. Use data to sort of power talent intelligence process to the way that they, the way that they do things. Are you seeing companies do that? And you know what, what does that, what does that look like from a LinkedIn perspective?
John Jersin [00:08:06]:
Yeah, that’s a great question. I’m glad that you brought up talent intelligence. I think it’s a theme that we’re very excited about at LinkedIn. What it means to us is essentially that just the use of data to improve your recruiting process in a couple of different ways. So inside the products that you’re using to hire, we use data to improve the effectiveness of those products. And that’s part of the story. The other part of the story is serving up data and insights and analytics on that data to people that are controlling the hiring process and executing the hiring process to help them do their job better. So, for example, inside our recruiting products, again, I’ll take Recruiter as an example. We’ve built out some new features. For example, there are spotlights like Likely to Respond, where we’re using all of our insights about members and who they might be interested in. As far as job prospects go. We’re serving up the people who are most likely to engage with you as a recruiter under that spotlight, Likely to respond. And again, that’s a lot of what’s driven up in mail response rates by so much. Now, there are other pieces that we’re bringing into the game, too. We’re on the verge of launching a new Talent Insights product that we announced at TalentConnect last year. And this is kind of the other half of talent Intelligence. We’re very excited about it. It essentially takes all of the LinkedIn data, all of the insight that we have into the dynamics of the market, into the supply and demand of different kinds of talent on our platform, and serves up those insights to people to help them make better decisions.
Matt Alder [00:09:47]:
And what kind of decisions would people be able to make from the insights that the product produces?
John Jersin [00:09:55]:
Yeah, it’s a great question. I think there’s some very critical decisions that we can help get right. So, in general, we’re really focused on empowering executives to make very good decisions about how they’re managing their workforce overall, and empowering recruiters directly on how to spend time most effectively, how to spend time with the right kinds of candidates and allocate their effort there. So, as a couple of examples, if you’re thinking about opening up a new office in a new region, say, somewhere in continental Europe, our product will be able to show you the dynamics around the kind of talent you’re going to want to hire there. So you identify a few skills that you’ll need to hire for in those markets, and we can show you how difficult or how easy it might be to hire in a variety of different locations. How much talent is there in the first place? We can answer a lot of questions like that that help you figure out where to establish your next office. So that’s one example, another example of just how to Allocate your time is we can show you what kinds of skills, what kinds of job titles in your existing workforce. You’re having an easier time hiring from where those hires are coming from. Or if you happen to be losing that talent, it’s kind of hard for you to hold onto it. We can show you that too. And so by examining across all the titles and all the skills that you need inside your workforce, we can show you which ones are kind of most of a struggle for you right now. And you can allocate more attention there. And we’ve actually seen a lot of customers in very early phases of this product, adopt it and start allocating, spend, for example, on our talent media products to very quickly address problems that they’re seeing in their hiring process in very specific areas.
Matt Alder [00:11:46]:
So one of the things that we sort of talk about a lot on this podcast is actually the future role of recruiters. So with all this technology, the automation, the power of data and talent intelligence, do you think that this technology has the ability to replace humans in the recruitment process or is there always a role for the human recruiter?
John Jersin [00:12:10]:
It’s a great question, Matt, and I totally understand where this question comes from. I get it a lot myself. I don’t think that that’s going to happen. I think that recruiters, their jobs are going to be changing over time, but I don’t think they’re going to be going away. Not for a very, very long time, at minimum. And when you actually look at what we’re doing in terms of using AI in this industry, we’re really focused on automating the time consuming portions of a recruiter’s job. So some aspects might diminish or they might go away. For example, scheduling. There’s a little bit of tedious work, you need to get it right every time. But it’s the kind of thing that in the near future a computer system can probably do. But what that does, we think is really just free you up to invest more in the human part of the process, more in actually talking to candidates, engaging with candidates, understanding what it is that they have to offer and what it is that they’re looking for in the next role. Same thing with the strategy side. As we serve up data more and more to help you make the best strategic decisions, there’s actually more of a need for people in the TA organization to be analyzing and understanding that data and planning around it. That’s something that just wasn’t possible before because we didn’t have those data insights as we have them. More and more, there’s going to be more of a need to operate there. So I think it’s more of a story of change than anything else. And I think there’s going to absolutely be an important part, an important role for recruiters to play and kind of the human touch in the process and increasingly in understanding what the best course of action is based on the data.
Matt Alder [00:13:56]:
So just sort of shifting focus to the, to, to the job seeker side of things. You know, one of the things that struck me when I first joined LinkedIn, you know, was it looked like it was going to be the sort of the death of the resume or the, you know, the cv, as we call it in Europe, you know, and as yet, that doesn’t seem to have happened. Do you, you know, do you, do you. People will still be using resumes in a few years time, or will, you know, their LinkedIn profile sort of finally replace those?
John Jersin [00:14:25]:
I think they’re different. I think a LinkedIn profile is the best way to keep people in your network and online up to date on how your career journey is playing out. But we see a resume as still an important part of the recruiting process. It’s kind of a private representation of you and it’s meant to be tailored to a particular audience at a particular time, even customized for different companies a little bit. And we think we can actually help there. We have a role to play. You may have seen this last year, but we announced this product called Resume assistant for Microsoft O365. And subscribers to that product can create a more compelling resume with insights pulled directly from LinkedIn. So, you know, we show, for example, relevant work experience, samples, top skills. We’re even starting to show you applicable jobs based on your interest, all inside that experience while you’re editing a resume inside of Microsoft.
Matt Alder [00:15:25]:
So we’re kind of recording this podcast sort of towards the end of. Towards the end of April, and it’s obvious that, you know, lots of things are happening in the industry at the moment. What’s LinkedIn looking forward to for the rest of 2018? What are you excited about seeing moving. Moving forward?
John Jersin [00:15:42]:
Yeah, I think the thing that I’m most excited about is the Talent Insights product that I mentioned, which we’re going to be launching later this year. We’ve had a few customers playing around with it already, and the kinds of things they’re accomplishing are pretty incredible. The kinds of decisions that they now feel empowered to make and the understanding of the talent landscape that they now have is just. It’s been a game changer for them. So what I’m most excited about is just seeing what customers think up when we launch that product at scale. I think that’s going to be an important part of the talent intelligence narrative in the industry broadly and just really excited to see what our customers do.
Matt Alder [00:16:22]:
Final question, and again, something I always ask everyone who comes on the show, what’s on your radar for the longer term? What do you think talent acquisition is going to look like in three to five years time?
John Jersin [00:16:35]:
Yeah, I think it’s more of the directions that I’ve been talking about in terms of automating some of the slower, more tedious parts of the recruiting process and helping recruiters invest more and more in the human parts of the process. If you think about it from a candidate’s perspective today, they’re often spending so much time filling out applications, going to interviews, and just researching new companies that they might want to work for just to find where they should apply. That’s what’s really consuming them as opposed to having these deeper, meaningful conversations with a representative of that company and really educating themselves on what’s going to be the best fit. And I think as we automate parts of the process and we make it more efficient, so we’re giving you a much smaller number of candidates to look at and giving candidates a much smaller number of companies to really deeply engage with and those engagements are more efficient. I think more of that time will be spent on just understanding fit, understanding the potential of this new person in this new place. And I don’t think any of us know exactly what that’s going to look like, but I think it’s clear we’re not hitting the mark yet. I think that there’s just a lot of improvement that the industry could see in terms of less tedious work, but more of that human connection.
Matt Alder [00:17:58]:
John, thank you very much for speaking to me.
John Jersin [00:18:00]:
Thanks so much, Matt. It’s been great.
Matt Alder [00:18:03]:
My thanks to John Jersen. You can subscribe to this podcast in itunes or via your podcasting app of choice. The show also has its own dedicated app, which you can find by searching for Recruiting Future in your App store. If you’re a Spotify user, you can also find the show there. You can find all the past episodes@www.rfpodcast.com on that site. You can also subscribe to the mailing list and find out more about working with me. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next week and I hope you’ll join me.
