How do I get to talent insights on LinkedIn?

LinkedIn’s talent insights feature provides helpful data on hiring, skills, and compensation trends. As a recruiter or hiring manager, talent insights can inform your recruiting and hiring strategy. Accessing talent insights is easy if you have a LinkedIn recruiter account. Here’s a quick rundown of how to find talent insights on LinkedIn.

What are talent insights on LinkedIn?

Talent insights on LinkedIn provide access to aggregated hiring data based on activity across the platform. The insights are meant to help recruiters and hiring managers make more strategic decisions about their hiring process. There are three main types of talent insights:

• Hiring insights – Data on which companies are hiring, how many open roles, what skills and titles are in demand, and compensation trends.
• Skills insights – Data on top skills by industry, emerging skills gaining traction, and skills companies are struggling to hire.
• Compensation insights – Data on salary trends by industry, job title, company size, location, and other filters.

With over 850 million members, LinkedIn has a huge amount of hiring data to draw from. While the insights are anonymized aggregates, they provide a useful snapshot of trends.

Why are talent insights useful?

As a recruiter or hiring manager, talent insights can help you in several ways:

• Benchmark salaries – Understand what the going rate is for roles you’re hiring for based on real-world data.
• Identify skill gaps – See which skills are in-demand but lacking in supply to focus training and hiring efforts.
• Research competitor hiring – Gauge which companies are expanding, contracting, and hiring for key roles.
• Spot talent trends – Identify rising and declining skills, titles, and hiring volume by industry.
• Enhance job posts – Optimize job posts and employer branding to attract in-demand talent.
• Forecast hiring needs – Anticipate growing areas and skills you may need to hire for in the future.

Having data-driven insights can make recruiting and hiring more efficient and effective. Talent insights help you align your strategy to the current labor market landscape.

What kind of LinkedIn account do I need?

To access talent insights, you need a LinkedIn Recruiter account. Here are the options:

As you can see, Recruiter Lite and Recruiter are the two paid account types that include access to talent insights. So if you want to view talent insights, you’ll need one of those accounts.

How to access talent insights

If you have a Recruiter account, here are simple steps to find talent insights:

1. Log into LinkedIn and access Recruiter.
2. Go to the Jobs page.
3. Click on “Insights” in the top toolbar.
4. You will see tabs for Hiring, Skills, and Compensation insights.
5. Explore the various data charts and filters.
6. Click “Export” to download data.

The hiring insights section provides data on:

• Top companies hiring
• Candidates hired
• Open jobs
• Applicants per job

You can filter by country, industry, job function, company size, and other parameters to customize the views. The skills section shows top skills by industry and job function. It also surfaces “rising” skills gaining momentum. Finally, the compensation section allows you to research and compare salary data for specific roles.

Customizing your talent insights

To get the most value, dig into the various filters and customization options within each section of talent insights. For example, you can:

• Look at hiring data by country and city to compare regions.
• Filter skills by industry and job level (entry vs. senior).
• View salary ranges by job title and company size or funding status.

Refine the data views that are most relevant for your recruiting role and business. The customizable filters let you tailor the insights to your needs.

Getting started tips

Here are some tips to make the most of LinkedIn talent insights:

• Take the product tour – Walk through LinkedIn’s guided tour on the first visit to learn how best to navigate talent insights.
• Review methodology – Read about LinkedIn’s methodology for generating the data to understand any limitations.
• Think strategically – Don’t just look at the data, reflect on how insights apply to your recruiting and business goals.
• Blend with other data – Combine talent insights with your own internal data for a complete picture.
• Revisit regularly – Check back weekly or monthly as the insights are dynamic and constantly updated.

With the right approach, talent insights can reveal trends and opportunities that help drive your recruiting success on LinkedIn.

Limitations to keep in mind

While talent insights provide invaluable aggregate data, there are some limitations to be aware of:

• Not a representative sample – LinkedIn members are not a representative sample of the overall workforce. Insights may be skewed towards more white-collar roles.
• Self-reported data – Members provide their own profile data, which may have inaccuracies or inconsistencies.
• Timeliness – There’s a slight data lag since insights are based on past hiring and activity.
• Broad view – The data gives a high-level overview of trends but does not provide company-specific insights.
• Limited exports – You can only export limited snapshots of data; APIs are not available for full data access.

Keeping these constraints in mind, talent insights still provide useful directional intelligence to aid hiring strategy and planning. But treat the insights as one data input, not the sole source of truth.

Getting more advanced insights

For recruiters and talent leaders who want additional or more customized analytics, LinkedIn offers advanced talent insight capabilities and partnerships:

LinkedIn Talent Insights

This standalone product provides expanded talent analytics beyond the core insights. Additional capabilities include:

• Talent pool analysis
• Custom reporting
• Headcount planning
• Diversity insights
• Competitive benchmarking
• Talent brand metrics

LinkedIn Talent Solutions

For enterprise recruiting teams, LinkedIn offers customized analytics taps directly into a company’s own hiring data through Recruiter System Connect. This enables tailored views and benchmarks.

Partner Ecosystem

LinkedIn partners with HR tech companies like Phenom and Entelo who build additional analytics products leveraging LinkedIn’s data through approved APIs. These can provide predictive insights and custom integrations.

So for those seeking more robust talent intelligence, LinkedIn offers expanded capabilities beyond the standard talent insights included with Recruiter accounts. The platform’s vast data assets can drive sophisticated analytics far beyond top-line trends.

Use cases and examples

To make talent insights more concrete, here are a few examples of how recruiters can apply the data:

Sourcing passive candidates

A recruiter at an auto manufacturing company needs to hire mechanical engineers. The talent insights show electrical and mechanical engineering skills are rising across the industry. The recruiter can source potential candidates with those skills who aren’t actively job seeking. They might otherwise have been overlooked.

Salary benchmarking

A startup is hiring software developers and wants to offer competitive salaries. By filtering compensation insights by company size and funding status, they can see the salary ranges at comparable startups. This enables them to set appropriate comp bands.

Opening new locations

A retail chain wants to expand by adding new store locations. The VP of HR can use hiring insights to identify US cities with growing hiring demand for retail workers. This helps prioritize locations likely to have ample talent supply.

Skills gap analysis

The head of L&D at a healthcare company needs to design new training programs. They can leverage skills insights to see the biggest skills gaps in the industry and identify emerging skills that will be critical for closing those gaps.

Localizing job posts

An agency is hiring social media managers across North America. The recruiter can use hiring insights to see which cities have the most demand. They then tailor job posts to use local city names, which resonates more with local candidates.

These examples illustrate just some of the ways recruiters can turn talent data into actionable strategies. The use cases will differ for every company and situation.

Conclusion

In today’s data-driven era, recruiting success requires tapping into talent analytics. LinkedIn’s talent insights provide a powerful window into hiring trends, skills, salaries, and more based on activity across the massive LinkedIn platform. While the insights have limitations, they can help recruiters and hiring managers make smarter decisions grounded in real-world data.

With a LinkedIn Recruiter account, you can access rich talent insights to benchmark salaries, identify talent gaps, research competitors, forecast hiring needs, spot trends, and ultimately hire better people faster. Just remember to layer in other data sources for a complete picture. If even more advanced analytics are needed, expanded offerings like Talent Insights and Talent Solutions provide enterprise-grade recruiting analytics fueled by LinkedIn’s data.

Used strategically, talent insights help move recruiting from an art towards a data-driven science that delivers results for today’s digital, skills-based economy.