Recruiters Find Treasure Trove of Customer Engagement Data Through LinkedIn

Dan Shapero, Director of Product Management at LinkedIn Careers, has more customer data than he knows what to do with, but that is one of the invaluable parts of his job. At first, recruiters found more value in the data than LinkedIn officials.

“One of the benefits of LinkedIn is that we’re sitting on this huge data and that data can be valuable from a number of perspectives,” Shapero said during the June 6 Stifel Technology Internet & Media Conference, according to Seeking Alpha. “One thing is that LinkedIn winds up being this quite horizontal platform that people use for a variety of reasons. And the Talent Solutions business sprang out of observing the fact that recruiters were using LinkedIn to find talent when we weren’t really focused on that opportunity at all. We thought about LinkedIn as a very general horizontal platform for professional consumption and we got very loud and clear signals that recruiters were getting a ton of value out of it.”

If only LinkedIn could build solutions that really catered to their needs as opposed to the generic use case, Shapero thought.

“We could use our charging for that and create a real market around that,” he explained. “And so one of the real data aspects that we have on LinkedIn is just this real ability to pick out power user use cases which have the ability to turn into a commercial product. Then, what we can do is apply that knowledge of a use case into an addressable market vision. In recruiting we know the rough size and shape of every recruiter in the world. We know the kinds of people in HR that do recruiting from time to time. We understand whether or not our ecosystem had engagement amongst professionals that those recruiters care about.  By looking at the general expansion of recruiters across LinkedIn, we can actually get a fairly good lens on what the addressable market is for those opportunities. Between the data point around what do people use LinkedIn for that we could build a business around and then what’s the size and shape of that opportunity to give us a lot of intelligence around making tradeoff investment allocations.”

What’s more, Shapero said: “It’s sort of the standard what kind of mix of doubling down on the things that are working versus trying new experimental ideas that we think have potential and how do you do that over a multi-year time horizon and sort of standard business strategy. But, I think the general advantage that we tend to have is that there’s a lot of visibility into where the people that we think could be buyers are and then how do we target them effectively with the offerings through sales and marketing.”

Shapero said the buying process is a corporate choice.

“Our product got into most companies by a single or a small set of recruiters saying, ‘I heard of this awesome thing called LinkedIn Recruiter and I would like to use it because the people I’m trying to recruit are on LinkedIn and I can't find them elsewhere,’’’ he explained. “So can you please fund company my use of this product? And so we’d start with a few seats. That’s how we started with Google. That’s how we started with Microsoft. That’s how we started with all of the blue-chip companies that we started with was a handful of recruiters. Most of them were already using LinkedIn to do this. They just weren’t paying us to do it, but realizing that we built this power user capability and that might actually help them do their jobs better. Now what would happen with it as those recruiters started to deliver returns that they’ve never been able to deliver before in terms of recruits, they started to talk to their colleagues about it. And over time, having a recruiter seat became a fundamental distinction between whether you were a serious high power recruiter or you were someone that did some recruiting at your company.”

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