LinkedIn made a pretty major product announcement today at their annual Talent Connect conference. By the way, no one talks about this, but quietly Talent Connect has become the single largest Talent Acquisition Conference on the planet! SHRM National (HR) has 15,000+, HR Technology Conference will go 6,000+, Talent Connect I heard was around 3,000+!

That’s a ton of TA pros and leaders in one location!

This morning in Nashville, LinkedIn let everyone get a peek behind the curtain on a new product that is just being released to beta with a select group of customers, with the goal to have this available to the entire market in the first quarter of 2018.

The new product is called Talent Insights.

For years LI users have been begging for more access to data and LinkedIn has responded in a major way with their Talent Insights product. Talent Insights is basically two major reporting tools that allow those using Talent Insights to pull in data like never before.

The first report is called Talent Pool. This report is a multi-filter report with a very familiar Recruiter-like interface. This tool is used by organizations to examine the available pool of candidates based on the filters you put in. Need to hire 50 Developers in Ann Arbor? This tool gives you all the information you need to make to launch the strategy to make that happen.

Talent pool gives your team the ability to be able to prioritize their efforts and sourcing strategy by seeing out of the entire available pool of talent, based on your search criteria, which ones are already engaged with your brand on LI, then if you’re using Recruiter you can quickly see that list and decide how do you reach out from there.

Let’s say that available pool of Developers in Ann Arbor is 10,000, but 1,500 of those developers have actually connected with you, looked at your LinkedIn company page, etc. This allows you to know who already is engaging with you, but also who hasn’t.

Within Talent Pool, you can also see where there are other available talent pools via a map function which allows you to click the locations on a map to see where these other pools are, and along with tons of data on active those pools of talent are.

The second reporting tool is the “Corporate” report. This is very cool in that you can now pull information on your competition in real time. Want to see who your competitors are hiring and in what roles? Done. Want to see where your competitors are hiring their talent from? Done. Want to see who your competition is losing talent to? Done.

By the way, it’s not only competition. The Corporate report will pull this data on any company, including your own.

The Corporate reporting tool also shows trends over time. Maybe your competition hired a ton of engineers from one company over the last twelve months, but in the last two months, they’ve hired no one from some others. Again, this gives your team insight to competitive behavior and skill sets like you’ve never had before.

Not only can you see what skill sets your competition is hiring, but the Corporate report will also show you how your own team stacks up in those skill sets against your competition from a hiring standpoint.

Like I said, great first step out of the gate on giving LI users more access to the data they’ve been asking for, and it’s easy to see where this could lead to down the road with some very robust, real-time business intelligence. We’ve known forever that LinkedIn was sitting on maybe the world’s largest data set, next to Facebook. We are now seeing the power of how that data can help your organization attract and recruit talent.