Talent Pipeline has been designed to address the need for recruiters to react faster to hiring needs. Simultaneously, the rise of social media and other new sources of potential candidates are driving a shift toward more direct sourcing. Recruiters are expanding their search beyond active candidates to include 'passive' candidates – those professionals not currently looking for their next career opportunity. Professional networks such as LinkedIn have made it possible to recruit passive candidates at scale for the first time.
LinkedIn's research found 92% of senior leaders in HR and talent acquisition regard recruiting passive candidates as central to or a part of their recruitment strategy, and 61% plan to increase their focus on recruiting passive candidates this year, according to recent research conducted by LinkedIn in the United States.
This stategy makes pipelining a top priority, but the proliferation of sources – from business cards collected at conferences and recruiting events to niche jobsites and referrals – makes it difficult for recruiters to track and stay up to date with all their leads. Current pipelining tools fall short, according to 86% of survey respondents.
The system allows recruiters to import leads and CVs into Recruiter, which are then compared to LinkedIn's network of 150 million members and paired with the relevant profile, which members keep updated even when they aren't job hunting; search, tag, and share records across the recruiting team, like any profile sourced on LinkedIn. And with new tools for adding a lead's source and status, recruiters can report on and improve the efficiency of their pipeline activities and evaluate and build relationships with leads, based on the insights provided by the LinkedIn profile, including shared connections, activity updates, recommendations and shared groups.
LinkedIn worked with a number of large recruiters to develop Talent Pipeline, including PepsiCo, Pfizer, Red Hat, First Citizens Bank and Netflix. Existing customers of LinkedIn Recruiter will begin seeing Talent Pipeline incorporated into the platform over the coming weeks.
Jim Schnyder, senior recruitment lead at PepsiCo, said: "This solution will transform what's possible for our recruiting organisation. We now have a centralised system in which we can create talent pools but also from other sources that we upload to the recruiter platform, such as our own spreadsheets, random files, and more – that are globally accessible, searchable and editable."
Talent Pipeline will be included for free as part of LinkedIn's recruiter product.