BREAKING: LinkedIn Talent Pipeline to manage your sourcing activities

Today LinkedIn announced during Talent Connect 2011, LinkedIn’s second annual Recruiting Solutions customer conference, LinkedIn Talent Pipeline. This promises to be “a powerful new solution to help companies more quickly and efficiently recruit top talent.  LinkedIn Talent Pipeline enables recruiters to create a single place to grow, track and stay connected with all of their talent leads, whether sourced on LinkedIn or not.  Those leads are connected to their LinkedIn profiles, creating a truly unique solution by tapping into the data and insights of the LinkedIn network.”

In other words, it’s an online tool to keep track of potential candidates for your current and upcoming positions. So it’s not an Applicant Tracking System, you cannot track and manage your candidates during the selection process. It’s a solution to store all your potential candidates in one place (whether or not you found them on LinkedIn). Wow, that sounds great! Until now, resourcers had only the option to track their sourcing pipeline by extracting the profiles or names out of LinkedIn (and other databases) into an Excel-sheet or seperate folder. The last thing I want is to mix potential candidates (with no contact details) with applicants in an ATS. So with Talent Pipeline they offer an online solution to manage my sourcing pipeline with the additional benefit that profiles are enriched by LinkedIn data. I get really excited by this idea and I think it’s brilliant!

Does this give me another reason to buy their professional products? Yes! Do I mind? No, because this tool promises to make my sourcing activities more effective and manage it in a more professional matter. LinkedIn Talent Pipeline will be included in the standard Recruiter seat license, at no additional charge, and be available in the first half of 2012.  A new LinkedIn Talent Pipeline seat will also be available, at a lower price, for the members of the recruiting team that aren’t using Recruiter.

It seems LinkedIn has studied Monster.com carefully. After all, they are directly competing with Monster and they have a similar solution (SeeMore) and an ATS (Talent Management Solution) so it makes sense that they offer this too. The difference is that LinkedIn offers it for free.

What’s next? Expect LinkedIn to move more into the talent community space. It’s likely that we’ll see more career planning or benchmarking solutions in the future as they sit on big data that can be very well used for this purpose. It can help people to plan their career and provides Talent Managers with much needed data and facts. Again, Monster has these ‘Career Assessment’ solutions too.

How Talent Pipeline Works

You can import leads and resumes from any source, either one at a time or in bulk from a spreadsheet or folder of resumes. Leads are automatically connected to their LinkedIn record and can be searched, tracked, and shared across the team, just like any profile sourced on LinkedIn.

You can connect your leads to their LinkedIn profiles and bring them up-to-date data with insights such as recommendations, activity updates, shared connections and groups, and more. You can use this information to help evaluate and build a relationship with a promising lead. New tools for tagging and tracking source and status will help organize and manage talent in the pipeline.

Of course you can find the people you want with powerful new search filters that let you search by status, activity conducted on a lead, and within the data your team is creating, such as tags and notes.

Another feature is to use pipeline reports to manage the health of recruiting efforts and share updates with hiring managers. The chart below is an example of the type of insights available, including number of leads added for a particular role, top sources of leads, and the status of leads in the pipeline.

Source: LinkedIn