From Insights to Pipeline: Using Data to Plan and Brand for the Future

Editor's Notes

• #2: Thank you all for joining us for this Talent Brand Workshop! Today’s topic is “From Insights to Pipeline: Using Data to Plan and Brand for the Future”.
• #3: Here’s a quick look at what we’ll cover in today’s keynote. We’re going to talk a bit about the changing talent landscape, then dive into the importance of data and how to glean insights from it, and lastly look at how you can put those insights to practice in building your pipeline.
• #4: As you are all undoubtedly aware, the talent landscape has been evolving, and continues to evolve, at a rapid pace. Long gone are the days of paper resumes and newspaper ads, and we’re well into the days of online profiles, social media, and an increasingly fragmented and challenging marketplace. In the past, it was the companies who had the proprietary skills and knowledge to find and hire amazing people that excelled. But in today’s world, the globalization and democratization of information has cracked open the market for talent and made it a much more level playing field for companies of all sizes.
• #5: The VAST majority of candidates are online, LinkedIn alone has 500 million plus members worldwide. This means that companies and people have access to a huge amount of information on jobs, employers, and more, and, perhaps more importantly, people have the ability to talk to each other about these things. People are no longer either active or passive, but rather lie somewhere on a spectrum of being open to opportunities. With unprecedented levels of transparency, competition for talent keeps getting harder.
• #6: The amount of information and messaging that people consumer is frankly mind-boggling. On average, adults spend over 11 hours a day consuming media! It is intricately woven into the fabric of everyone’s lives and seems to only be increasing in its omnipresence.
• #7: Media has no boundaries either. People are even searching for jobs in bed and in the bathroom!
• #8: Coupled with the ever-growing media consumption and social networking, is the recent shift in balance between job openings and hiring. In the past few years, the US has switched from having more people in need of jobs than job openings, to having more job openings than potential hires. This means that people can be more selective in their career decisions, again making it harder for companies to find and hire the right talent.
• #9: So how can you break through all this noise? What can you do to stand out amongst all the people and companies competing for mindshare?
• #10: That’s where data comes in! Using data in the right way to uncover meaningful insights can point your business and your talent acquisition team in the right direction. Finding in-demand talent, knowing the right messaging to use, understanding competitive threats, and identifying new market opportunities are just some of things you can do with data. We’re going to spend the bulk of today’s keynote talking about how to do just that! But first, I want to get you excited about the impact of having the right data and insights!
• #11: We found that talent acquisition teams with mature analytics are TWICE as likely to improve their recruiting efforts…
• #12: And THREE times more likely to realize cost reductions and efficiency gains.
• #13: But what specifically does data-driven recruiting mean? Well we define it as “the analysis and interpretation of talent pool data to find the best people for your organization faster”. The value in data-driven recruiting is truly the interpretation part. Anyone can accumulate data, but it’s the ability to combine that data with your knowledge and instincts that makes it powerful.
• #14: Recruiters from all over the world know that value. 77% of recruiters told us that they’re more efficient when they have that solid understanding their market and talent pools.
• #15: But unfortunately, most of the time you don’t have what you need. 2 out 3 recruiters said they don’t have the tools necessary to understand the market and talent pools, and that’s an unfortunate dilemma.
• #16: Today, my hope is to empower you to become a data-fueled powerhouse that gives you the leg up against your competition.
• #17: So let’s dive in! First, we’re going to talk about how to find and use the data.
• #18: We’re going to look at two types of data that you can use: macro and micro. Macro data gives you a broader view of key trends in an industry or large talent pool. Micro data focuses on your specific company or small set of companies and gives you a narrower view of exactly what’s going on in your immediate space. By combining both types of data, we’re going to work toward building profiles of key hiring segments.
• #19: We’ll start by getting the big picture with macro data. I’m going to walk through some examples of industry reports and talent pool reports. This is just a sampling of the data, and you all have printed copies at your seats of these full reports. For today’s example, we’re going to talk about a hypothetical company in the computer software industry that’s looking to hire sales people. Let’s call this company Flexis.
• #20: We’ll begin by looking at the industry talent pool report. This report specifically looks at an industry as whole, not just a particular function. We’ll get to the function part later. This first cut of data shows us what regional growth looks like in the computer software industry. We can see the top ten regions for growth. Anyone as surprised as me about Madison? Knowing what the top ten areas are is ok, but thinking further about what that really means to the business is more helpful. So what are some insights that Flexis might be able to glean from this data? -For one, they may experience greater competition for talent in these fast-growing regions, but at the same time might also be able to find a larger pool of people with software experience in those same places. -If Flexis is thinking about expanding, these cities could also be good prospects for new offices.
• #21: This industry report also looks at the top industries feeding into the computer software industry and also taking talent away from the computer software industry. Flexis might benefit from expanding their search criteria beyond computer software to Information Technology and Services and Internet. If you couple the flows from higher education with the data about recent graduate hiring, you can see that computer software is a very popular industry for post-grads. Flexis should think about focusing their campus hiring on the top schools listed here. __________________________ “More than 16 million people in the US—about 8 percent of the population—now have a master's, a 43 percent increase since 2002.” .Jul 27, 2015
• #22: The last thing we’ll look at from the industry report is the popular content and groups. This information is very helpful in shaping your content marketing strategy and outreach channels. In this case, Flexis should aim to share content about leadership, cloud computing, and start-ups. It would also be great to encourage employees to blog about these topics. __________________________ “More than 16 million people in the US—about 8 percent of the population—now have a master's, a 43 percent increase since 2002.” .Jul 27, 2015
• #23: Now that we’ve looked at an industry report, let’s take a focused look at a particular job function. We’ll look at the salesperson talent pool. Just a heads up that this data is for sales people across all industries, not just computer software. But we can combine what we learn from both to develop a pretty clear picture of what Flexis should do with respect to sales recruiting in the computer software industry. Similar to the first chart in the industry report, this geographic view of the talent pool data shows us where the key markets are for sales people. The size of the bubble indicates the size of the talent pool and the color indicates the competition level. The green bubbles are what we call “hidden gems” – these are areas where there’s a sizeable number of sales professionals but a lower level of competition. For Flexis, that means these are good areas from which to recruit, so they should focus on places like LA and Dallas. Since competition among the sales talent pool is increasing, an average 28% increase in inMails per member in fact, it will be critical for Flexis to make their inMails and messaging stand out from the crowd.
• #24: Something that will help Flexis do that, is knowing what sales people want in a job and what interests them. On the left, we can see the top 5 things sales people want. Excellent comp and benefits and good work/life balance comes up as the top 2 for basically every talent pool, so I find it more insightful to look at 3-5. In this case, highlighting culture and the ability to make an impact will help Flexis’ messaging resonate with sales people. If we look at some of the top content that sales people have engaged with, we see that it often has to do with sales tactics. (“What I learned making 300 cold calls” and “Stop touching base with your prospects”) Combined with what we also know about the computer software industry, cloud computing definitely stands out as well given that it’s popular in both the industry and talent reports.
• #25: It’s also important to know when people will be most receptive to your messaging. Here, we see that sales people are most likely change jobs after roughly 3 years, so Flexis should focus the search to people with that level of experience. At a more granular level, sending short inMails on Mon-Weds or the weekend will elicit the best responses. But what if you want to get even more specific and narrow in your talent pool research? Next, I’m going to show you how you can do some of your own research in LinkedIn Recruiter, using search insights.
• #27: So we’ve seen the forest, now let’s look at the trees. What does the data look like at your company’s level?
• #28: Part of the benefit of having 500+ million members is that we have a treasure-trove of data that helps give you a clear picture of your company’s talent landscape. Where are your hiring opportunities and threats? Looking at your talent flows shows you the key companies that your winning talent from and losing talent to. In Flexis’ case, they’re equally winning and losing talent from most top competitors, but some companies that stand out are Hewlett Packard and Amazon. Their winning percentage against HP is strong, so that’s likely a good company to focus recruiting efforts on. Conversely, Flexis has a losing ratio to Amazon and this may warrant digging into? Is this a trend that may worsen? Is there something they should do to stop this talent flow or is just a natural progression? Are there things Amazon is offering that Flexis could adapt to also offer employees?
• #29: If we take a look at Flexis’ employees’ connections, we see that the employees are very connected to the same companies that Flexis typically hires from. This is probably not surprising to anyone, but what it means is that Flexis should encourage employee referrals as this should be an easy and prime source of talent. We also see that Flexis has significantly fewer followers than their top talent competitors, so they may want to work on building their follower base.
• #31: Whoo, that was a lot of data! Hopefully you’re all still awake and your eyes haven’t glazed over, because now I’m going to really show you how to put all that data and the insights you’ve derived into practice to attract the right talent to your organization. Because at the end of the day, that’s the point, right?
• #32: There are 4 key steps to using data to build your pipeline. The first is assessing the data for each of your key hiring segments. We’ve just gone through an examples of how to do this. Next you use the insights you uncovered in that analysis to build unique personas and EVPs. Using those, you can then determine your outreach strategy for each segment. And last but not least, launch targeted campaigns that fuel your pipeline.
• #33: Since we’ve already talked about the first step, we’re going to skip ahead to building personas. Ask the audience: By a show of hands, how many of you have personas for your key hiring segments? For those that do, great work! For those that don’t, no worries, that’s why you’re here learning today! And you’ll all have an opportunity to share your tips and thoughts during the round table section which is next. But back to our example of Flexis on the hunt for computer software sales people. This is one of their key hiring segments, and based on what we learned from the data, we have a pretty clear picture of what this talent pool looks like and we can use that to build a persona. I always think it’s beneficial to give your personas names and faces, so let’s call this ideal computer software sales person Melissa. Who is Melissa? Well based off of what we learned we actually know a lot about Melissa! She works in Computer Software, IT Services, or Internet industries. She’s likely to change jobs after 3+ years She’s interested in learning about sales tactics, cloud computing, start-ups She wants a company with a good, strong culture and one that gives her the ability to make an impact And lastly, she’s most receptive to inMails early in the week or on weekends Why do we care about these things? Because they are actionable insights that show Flexis how to attract and influence Melissa and ideally inspire her to work there. The best practice is to then take it a step further and create different employer value propositions for Melissa and each respective unique persona. Having unique personas for each key hiring segment then allows you to create unique outreach plans and messaging.
• #34: Which brings us to our favorite funnel that I’m sure you’ve all seen before! How are we going to message Melissa along her journey and build her awareness, generate interest, and turn her into a lead/applicant? The top of the funnel is all about influencing talent and building awareness. At this stage you’re just warming Melissa up and making sure she knows who you are. Next comes the interest stage where you need to drive preference for your company and up the chances that Melissa will want to pursue a career opportunity with you. Once she’s interested, you need to convert her to a lead. An important thing to note here is that you may need to dial up or dial down certain aspects of this depending on the hiring segment. Maybe people like Melissa are already really familiar with you, so you can invest more in building interest in preference. For a different hiring segment that maybe doesn’t know anything about you, you may need to focus more heavily on first building awareness.
• #35: You are likely using a variety of platforms and tools to reach people along their journeys (as you should), but I’m going to highlight how you can do this on LinkedIn. We’ll touch on the top two stages of the funnel and talk about Recruitment Ads, Sponsored Updates, Career Pages, and Pipeline Builder. I imagine many of you have seen ads, Sponsored Updates, and Career Pages before, so I’m going to put extra focus on Pipeline Builder. This is a brand new product that I’m really excited to show you! But we’ll get to that in just a moment…
• #36: Before anybody ends up in your pipeline, they first need to know who you are. (click) Recruitment Ads are a great first step at generating awareness. They invite your ideal talent to explore your culture and opportunities. They’re a perfect way to introduce your company to people. (click) Sponsored Updates let you take it to the next level with those people by engaging them with targeted, relevant content and building relationships. Remember your persona here, Melissa wants to hear about sales tactics and cloud computing!
• #37: Once you’ve captured Melissa’s interest, she’s ready to learn more and visits your Career Page where you’ve highlighted your culture (and we know that’s important to her), showcased your employees, and inspired her to explore your open job opportunities.
• #38: At this point, Melissa should be very open to your career opportunities and that’s where Pipeline Builder comes in. Pipeline Builder is a personalize page that enables you to generate a targeted pipeline of interested talent for your most important opportunities. All of the things we’ve just spoken about (ads, Sponsored Updates, and your company page) can drive Melissa to this page and in one click she can submit her info to you! But this is something really best seen live!
• #39: Let’s take a look at Pipeline Builder in action!
• #40: I certainly hope that demo showed you the true power of this new, elegant solution, but the proof is in the pudding. Pipeline Builder is a fantastic way to expand reach and find leads that are NEW to your company. In fact, 83% of leads sourced through Pipeline Builder during our charter period had not previously applied to a job at that company.
• #42: So, what are the key takeaways for today? If you remember nothing else, remember these three points: 1. Pair macro and micro data to get a detailed picture of your hiring landscape 2. Use insights to build robust profiles for your ideal talent 3. Launch tailored outreach programs to fuel your pipeline Following these steps should make you a trusted partner to your business and a data superhero!
• #43: I thought I’d end with something I find inspiring. Take a peek at how LinkedIn is using data to transform people, companies, and the world.