A new way for recruiters to hire the best talent, faster.

LinkedIn, the world’s largest professional network with more than 150 million members worldwide, today announced the roll-out of LinkedIn Talent Pipeline to its thousands of corporate recruiting customers. Talent Pipeline enables recruiters to easily manage all of their talent leads in one place, regardless of the source, helping them recruit top talent more quickly. Talent Pipeline will be included for free as part of LinkedIn’s flagship Recruiter product.

Talent Pipeline addresses a new reality facing recruiters. In a quickly changing business environment, recruiters need 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 and recruiters expanding their search beyond active candidates to include ‘passive’ candidates; those professionals not currently looking for their next career opportunity. Professional networks like LinkedIn have made it possible to recruit passive candidates at scale for the first time.

Identifying and building relationships with these potential hires before they enter the formal job application process enables companies to react faster to hiring needs as they arise. In fact, 92 per cent of senior leaders in human resources and talent acquisition regard recruiting passive candidates as central to or a part of their recruitment strategy, and 61 per cent plan to increase their focus on recruiting passive candidates this year, according to recent research conducted by LinkedIn in the United States1.

This strategy makes pipelining a top priority, but the proliferation of sources – from business cards collected at conferences and recruiting events to niche job sites 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 per cent of survey respondents.

“With the rise in sources of passive talent, recruiters need a simple and intelligent way to grow, track, and stay in touch with their talent pipeline,” said Parker Barrile, head of products for LinkedIn Hiring Solutions. “We’re dedicated to building best-in-class products to help recruiters connect talent with opportunity worldwide, and Talent Pipeline is the next step. It’s an easy extension of the sourcing that recruiting teams already do on the network today.”

Most passive candidates have not applied for a job in the past, so they are not in a company’s Applicant Tracking System (ATS). Many recruiters currently track leads in spreadsheets, which don’t allow for collaboration, or databases which quickly grow stale. Talent Pipeline solves these problems, enabling recruiters to:

• Import leads and CVs into Recruiter, which are then compared to LinkedIn’s network 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.
• 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.

“This solution will transform what’s possible for our recruiting organization,” said Jim Schnyder, senior recruitment lead at PepsiCo. ‘In Talent Pipeline, we now have a centralized system in which we can create talent pools – based on LinkedIn searches, 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.”