I originally wrote about this topic on May 17, 2016, in a blog post called “How to Get Talent Pool Insights from LinkedIn“. In the past seven years, I have continued to use these talent pool insights, but I have also updated my approach and what I share with hiring managers. I’m sharing this article with you about what I am doing now.
First, a quick recap on why you should be doing this too. We all know hiring managers who give us a long list of required skills and technologies for their roles, but they don’t really understand the impact of the requirements they set. Saying there are too many requirements or that few would meet these requirements only makes hiring managers think you are lazy or incompetent. However, metrics and numbers are respected and you will be seen as an expert in talent acquisition. Sharing these, hiring managers may be more receptive to changing their requirements. Other side benefits of doing the searches and gathering the talent pool insights are as follows:
- The talent pool insights help in terms of understanding what might not be the right keywords or terms. I have had hiring managers ask for skill sets that, when I looked on LinkedIn, showed only double-digit numbers of profiles for that office location. One term alone should not kill the candidate pool so readily, so it might not be the right term to use.
- As you look at the top few profiles, you might see other technologies or skills that the profiles tend to have listed as well. You could ask your hiring managers if these are used by their departments and they might be good additional preferences. This will put you in an “expert” status, as it shows you know something about what they are doing.
- You might see that most of the profiles you see are all coming from one or two companies in the area (besides your own). This can be used to fuel the conversation of where to find these candidates. You can say that you know that company X and company Y have a lot of these kinds of people, so would these be good places to recruit from and what other companies might be good places to look at for sourcing.
As an example of what I do now, I am going to use the same search criteria as the previous article. Let’s say that before an intake call a hiring manager sends you the job description for a Java developer in Boston with Hadoop, Hive, Pig, HBase, ETL, JSON, REST, and a half dozen other items. The first thing I do is open my Talent Pool Insights Automated Spreadsheet. Click the link and you can make a copy for yourself (feel free to share it). Please note, there are Macros and Apps Script used, so make sure to copy it all and allow the Macros and Apps Script to run.
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