It’s that time of year when everyone is publishing their predictions for 2019. Will AI finally take over? Will Blockchain dominate? Well, the only way to really find out is to wait and see. As my contribution to the end of year prediction frenzy I’m going to dedicate the next two episodes of the show to some key areas I think Talent Acquisition professionals will be focusing on in 2019.
In this episode, I want to look at data and insights. This is a big topic that I will dive into in more details in future shows but, in the meantime, who better to give us a sense of the art of the possible than Eric Owski, Director, Product Management Talent Insights at Linkedin.
In the interview we discuss:
- Why LinkedIn waited so long to launch a Talent Insights product
- Using data to find and recruit in-demand talent
- Using data insights to measure the comparative strength of employer brands
- Use cases for talent insights and the successes forward thinking employer are already achieving.
- Using data to optimise recruitment marketing budgets and set hiring manager expectations
Eric also shares some advice on how Talent Acquisition teams can get started using data strategically, and he also shares some of LinkedIn’s future plans for this area.
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Transcript: Matt Alder [00:00:00]: Support for this podcast is provided by jobyac, the industry’s first recruitment marketing platform designed exclusively for Google for jobs. For the first time in house, recruiters can take advantage of the immense power of Google by posting jobs directly to Google for Jobs without the need for job board middlemen. Jobiac’s platform encodes job posts to be read by Google and automatically posts them in just three quick steps. Visit www.jobiac.AI to try it for free today, just enter the URL of your job post and jobyak will take care of the rest. For a limited time, Recruiting Future podcast listeners can receive 10% off the monthly price when they sign up. Just use the code rfpodcast to claim your discount. The website again www.job AI and job is spelled G O B I A K. Matt Alder [00:01:20]: Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 162 of the Recruiting Future podcast. It’s the time of year when everyone is publishing their predictions for 2019. Will AI finally take over? Will blockchain dominate? Well, the only way to really find out is to wait and see. As my contribution to the end of year prediction frenzy, I wanted to dedicate the next two episodes of the show to a couple of key areas I think talent acquisition professionals will be focusing on in 2019. First of all, this week I want to look at data and insights. This is a big topic and something I’ll dive into in more detail in future shows. But in the meantime, who better to give us a sense of the art of the possible than Eric Owski, Director, Product Management of talent insights at LinkedIn. Hi Eric, and welcome to the podcast. Eric Owski [00:02:23]: Hi Matt, Great to be here. Matt Alder [00:02:24]: An absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Could you introduce yourself and tell everyone who you are? Eric Owski [00:02:31]: I work in product management at LinkedIn and I lead our new Talent Insights product and our talent brand product. Matt Alder [00:02:37]: Fantastic. Now, Talent Insights is something that I really wanted to discuss discuss on today’s show. Obviously, you know, LinkedIn’s been collecting data for years and years and years, but has only recently sort of created this Talent Insight product. Well, why did you wait so long to sort of let people access the considerable data that you guys have been collecting? Eric Owski [00:03:00]: Well, first, I think there are a couple of reasons. One is that we felt like our customer base, the number of people within the talent profession that were ready and had demand for a product like this and told us they really needed Data like this to make decisions day to day. I think that just, you know, the number of those folks exploded over the last few years. So that was one dimension of the decision. And then the second was that we had grown our member base, I think at the time when we announced the product to over 450 million members. And now we’re about 590 million members. And that gives us coverage in almost every major world economy of more than 70% of the workforce of the professional workforce in those markets. So our data was at a point where it was ready to help talent professionals use it to make decisions in very far reaching places. And I think very early on in our early access programs and now since we’ve launched the product globally, we’ve seen customers having success with the product in places like Algeria, Ukraine, Estonia, Malaysia. Because in many of those places our data coverage is strong enough to tell the right story about the key trends that are happening in that market and good enough to make critical decisions on your workforce. Matt Alder [00:04:20]: So can you tell us a bit more about the kind of data that’s available and how companies can use it to find, recruit, hire and retain in demand talent? Eric Owski [00:04:30]: Yeah, so I mentioned that our member base is about 590 million people globally. We also have about 20 million jobs that we collect from thousands of sources around the world. From all of the profile data and company data we have, we’ve extracted about 35,000 standardized skills and 23,000 standardized job titles. So those are the raw materials that make up talent Insights. What we’ve seen companies doing with the product over the last year or so, we really distilled all the different uses into about five use cases. One is hiring strategy. So this is the most daily of the use cases. How do I take the data and talent insights to learn more about supply demand in the market, make decisions about where’s the best place to recruit for this role or what’s the best company to target for this type of talent. And we’ve seen it empower recruiters in particular to have much more informed conversations with hiring managers. Second is workforce planning. So a much more long term and aggregate view on the market. Does this market have the talent we need to support our growth in that market for the next two or three years? Third is employer brand. So do we have a brand strong enough to acquire the talent that we need in a particular talent pool? Fourth is competitive intel. So who has the talent we need today? Are we losing critical skills to competitors? And then the last is site location. So we’re thinking about either Scaling up talent at an office we already have, or potentially opening a new site location altogether. And then Talent Insights, I think, has been very instructive and one of the major data inputs for those decisions. So it’s been a really broad set of use cases that spans a number of different talent functions, everything from recruiting to recruiting leaders to talent management professionals and people analytics professionals. And we’ve been very excited about the diversity of adoption within our early user base. Matt Alder [00:06:26]: Now there’s some fascinating use cases there and it would be good to kind of, you know, sort of dig deeper and find out a little bit about a few of them. But perhaps the best way to start that is to sort of ask you, you know, what, what companies have been, have been using this well, and what’s sort of been achieved by, you know, accessing the data insights that you guys have. Eric Owski [00:06:48]: Yeah, so one of the companies that was part of our early access programs and I think had success early on was Atlassian. Atlassian is a growing tech company. They’re headquartered in Australia, but they have a growing presence in the United States. Many of the tech firms in the valley use their products for product management or project management. And they were starting to grow their presence in the San Francisco Bay area and struggling significantly with user experience designers and found that they had basically been investing the same amount in each open headcount for engineering as they did for user experience design. But it turned out that the shortage of user experience design was much more acute according to Talent Insights. And so they actually reallocated their campaign budget and overinvested on a per head basis in user experience design to meet the gap that they were experiencing. So that’s one example, I think another. And this is, as I said, I think the most common and daily of the use cases. But it feels very empowering for the users who experience this success. Autodesk used Talent Insights to have much more informed conversations with hiring managers. And in a number of cases, they were able to get to a faster time to fill just by sharing some of the data on skills and Talent Insights. So there is, you know, I think a classic recruiting story is the hiring manager comes to you with a set of requirements that are nearly impossible to fill. But I think with Talent Insights now, you can very quickly identify that, that there is a shortage of a particular skill and it’s going to narrow the addressable market to, you know, to a degree that it’s going to make it very hard to fill the position. And so they’ve been able to use Talent Insights live chairside sitting with the hiring manager and show how requiring a certain skill reduces the available talent in the market. And as a result, they were able to get to better time to fill on a set of critical positions. Matt Alder [00:08:49]: Fantastic. You also mentioned insights around talent branding, and that’s a topic that we sort of COVID time and time again on the podcast and is always sort of very popular with the audience. And it’s something that in the past it’s always been quite different, difficult to get measurements and statistics around. Could you sort of talk us through that particular use case and what people can get from your system? Eric Owski [00:09:16]: Yeah. So the first thing that I think a lot of companies struggle to answer is how much access to a particular talent pool do we have? And because LinkedIn is facilitating millions of transactions between job seekers and employers every day, we have a very clear picture of how much brand awareness a company has within a talent pool. So, for example, if you’re looking for software engineers or mechanical engineers, you can see relative to your peer set, which in January, users of talent Insights will be able to select for themselves. So peer set of companies that you want to compare to and see how much has this talent pool engaged with my brand on LinkedIn? How much have they interacted with the updates I’ve posted? How much have they interacted with my jobs? And you can see how you rank against a set of competitors. In addition, you can see things like how does our InMail response rate look relative to competitors? So if I send an InMail to a candidate, are they responding at the same rate to me as they are to a competitive set? So these are good indications of brand awareness. I think these are also good indications of messaging effectiveness from recruiters. So are we sending the right messages? Give if we’re in a pool or within a set of competitors and we all have a similar value proposition, are they responding better or worse to me or my recruiters than they are to my competitors? And I think we’ve seen companies make very quick adjustments with the data that they’ve seen there, including making more significant investments in their talent brand. They’ve had the case, I think, with, with a good fact base to go to leadership and say if we don’t invest in our brand within this talent pool, it’s going to be very hard to meet our talent objectives. Matt Alder [00:11:05]: Now with, with, with your customers kind of using, using this data, you know, obviously lots of interesting insights coming out, fascinating use cases. What’s the one thing that surprised you the most about what’s been sort of coming through from the market Well, I. Eric Owski [00:11:22]: Think what has surprised me the most is just how many talent teams are fully ready to take this on with very little learning curve. So I think we have seen everyone from recruiters to recruiting leaders dive right in and know what to do, know how to interpret data, know how to share it with their internal stakeholders like hiring managers, but also with more senior business leaders. And I think what’s just striking about it is how fundamentally the talent professional ecosystem has changed in the last five years. Because I think five years ago I’m not sure that that would have been true. And now it appears to me that most talent teams are very ready for a product like this. I will add, though, that I think that there’s another set of. There’s significant stratification within talent teams. And I think there are a lot of other talent teams I’ve interacted that have the impulse, they know they need to adopt this, but they just don’t have that muscle built yet as an organization. And I think that’s where there’s probably a huge need for us to come alongside and do some coaching and help them build that muscle over the next year or so. But I think it’s going to be a necessity. And the talent teams that are leading with analytics are going to have a significant competitive advantage over teams that don’t. So our goal is to get the entire, the entire industry there, the entire group of professionals who are thinking about building the workforce at companies to the point where they feel comfortable using data. But right now it feels like there’s some stratification. Matt Alder [00:13:00]: Absolutely. And it’s really interesting you say that because what I find from talking to talent teams is there are people who literally can’t get enough data and are trying to make their, their decisions and their strategies as data driven as possible. But there is this, this other group of people who are, you know, struggling to see, struggling to sort of work out practically how it can, you know, fit into their activity and their strategy. Now, have you got any sort of advice for people in that group in terms of how they can, how they can get started and how they can get some momentum going? Eric Owski [00:13:37]: Absolutely. I, I think one thing that’s become clear to me is the teams that have been most successful with analytics, they define a set of problems or questions very clearly. So one of the interesting things about talent insights, and I think most of the users who have used the product in the last several months have experienced something like this. There’s a ton of data, more than you can consume easily. And also there’s a Lot of fun data in the product, too. I think that it’s fun to start looking at companies and looking at the company reports and, and seeing workforce trends, but that’s not a great way to adopt the product successfully. I think that companies that have defined a set of talent problems, so we have a workforce, we have a talent shortage in research and development in a particular region. And we want to understand where is the best market to go get this talent, which competitors have this talent today. How do they define the roles? Those are a set of questions that are answerable within Talent Insights. And if you go into Talent insights for just 10 minutes, you can probably come up with a presentation or quick distillation of the answers to the problem that you can present to leadership. So companies that define the problems clearly within talent, I think are able to have success immediately and kind of show traction. And I think that’s where the coaching is needed, is how do we define the critical problems? And let’s show you exactly how within the product you can go answer those problems in just a few minutes. Matt Alder [00:15:05]: So, final question. It’s kind of pretty clear that as an industry, we’re on a bit of a journey when it comes to data analytics and using data in a meaningful way. Where are LinkedIn going with this next? What are you most excited about? About the future? Eric Owski [00:15:26]: Yeah, so there are a few things that are coming in the near term that we’re really excited about. One is salary data. So we’ve been collecting salary data at SC over the last couple of years and we’re going to integrate it into talent Insights. So if you’re looking at a talent pool, you’re going to be able to see the salary data for different cities, different industries, and even different companies, which I think is a very helpful way to benchmark yourself against the market. And also I think is one of the leading causes of not being able to find the talent you need is there’s something that changed in salary data and you know, it’s happening in real time enough that you need a product like Talent Insights to see that. Second, we’re planning on integrating it more deeply in the next couple of quarters with our recruiter product. So one of the things that we’ve observed from recruiter users is they really want access to the data, but they want it within the workflow they use every single day. And so we want to make sure that we embed as much of the intelligence, intel and insights into the recruiter workflow. And then a little bit longer term, something that we’re going to be experimenting with over the next few months. And then hopefully within the next 12 months, we’re going to have something very robust is real time Alerts. So because there’s so much data in the product and so many different things, talent pools, companies that a lot of users want to follow, we want to make sure that we are able to surface changes in talent pools as they happen. Changes in companies as they happen. And so we’re working on a system of real time alerts and notifications that can help inform our users anytime there’s something new that they need to know about. And then one last thing. This is maybe not looking forward. It’s something we just announced is Gender Insights Globally. So we announced Gender Insights in the United states at the TalentConnect in October, and then in November we had an event in London where we announced that we were launching Gender Insights Globally. And what that allows you to do is see the gender breakdown of talent pools all over the world for just about any talent pool that we have. And for companies that are really trying to increase their chances of getting the right gender representation within different parts of their workforce, this gives them visibility that I don’t think has ever really existed before into the talent pools around the world. So we’re really excited about Gender Insights and think it’s going to help all of our customers achieve their diversity objectives. Matt Alder [00:17:58]: Eric, thank you very much for talking to me. Eric Owski [00:18:00]: It was great to be here. Thanks, Matt. Matt Alder [00:18:02]: My thanks to Eric Owski. You can subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts 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 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.
