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LinkedIn's Forthcoming Analytics Tool May Boost Job Poaching (techtarget.com) 85

dcblogs writes: LinkedIn has developed a new analytics platform that should make it easier to poach job candidates. It will use its vast database of nearly 600 million profiles to help recruiters find pockets of talent, know the attrition rate and glean competitive data. The platform, due in September, was discussed at a recent HR conference. One attendee asked a LinkedIn official: "Does that set up an environment for poaching talent?" And then she immediately answered her own question. "I think the answer is yes. And so why would I sign off on that?" In response to the attendees' question, Eric Owski, the head of product for Talent Insights at LinkedIn, said there was nothing wrong with making this data available. The LinkedIn team concluded that "the world is becoming more transparent," and "very sophisticated teams at large companies were able to figure out a lot of the calculations that we're making available in this product," he said. "We think by packaging it up nicely, it levels the playing field," Owski said. "We feel like we're on safe ground."
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LinkedIn's Forthcoming Analytics Tool May Boost Job Poaching

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  • Nobody owns me. (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    If I want to leave for a better job, it is my right. My employer does not own me, and these days, the employer has probably not paid for training or made any other investment in me.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      the employer has probably not paid for training or made any other investment in me.

      Years ago it was common for employers to invest in training because they could require the employee to agree to either continue to work for X years, or reimburse the company for the cost of the training if they quit early.

      Today, those agreements are illegal. So why should a company invest in you if they don't know if they can recoup the cost?

      The change in the law was to "protect employees". But the result was lower skills, lower productivity, lower pay, hurting employees, hurting companies, and hurting th

      • Good slave.
        Keep spouting the corporate line. Your betters will see what a good slave you are and reward you.

        Any minute now.

      • Re:Nobody owns me. (Score:5, Insightful)

        by turbidostato ( 878842 ) on Tuesday June 26, 2018 @01:01AM (#56846270)

        "Today, those agreements are illegal. So why should a company invest in you if they don't know if they can recoup the cost?"

        Because they think of the consequences of *not* training you?

        They can have a productive worker that *may* go, or a inefficient worker that *will* stay.

      • Re:Nobody owns me. (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Alain Williams ( 2972 ) <addw@phcomp.co.uk> on Tuesday June 26, 2018 @03:56AM (#56846584) Homepage

        Years ago it was common for employers to invest in training because they could require the employee to agree to either continue to work for X years, or reimburse the company for the cost of the training if they quit early.

        I have had people complain to me that they had been sent on courses in which they had no interest and been asked to pay for them when they left.

        An employer should make valued employees want to stay by making working for them attractive. A good wage, pleasant environment, being sent on courses all help to make the employer attractive.

        • I can see both sides. There may be classes/training that is necessary to achieve a promotion that comes with a raise; if so, perhaps such is fair. But, yes, in general, I do not see it as appropriate to shackle an employee with fake debt to keep his or her job -- I can see how that could be horrendously gamed.

    • by Shotgun ( 30919 )

      One of my first employers was an honest guy. He told me my job was to sell my services to the highest bidder.

  • For solid employees, anyway. Poaching generally requires a company to make a better offer; this sounds like it'll let good employees know when they're underpaid and get them an offer closer to what they're worth.

    Less of a good deal for employers, of course, and deadwood will continue to be paid what they're worth (or not) as well.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      deadwood will continue to be paid what they're worth (or not) as well.

      I don't think so. Employers will start gaming this as soon as it goes live, by writing glowing endorsements for their deadwood employees in the hope that someone else poaches them. That way they can get rid of them without paying severance.

    • by raymorris ( 2726007 ) on Monday June 25, 2018 @08:58PM (#56845784) Journal

      At this stage of my career, I'm happy to have recruiters have better tools to know when to contact me and when NOT to. I'm pretty happy with my job, I love working from home. I also see the handwriting on the wall as my employer moves jobs overseas. So I'm aware that while I like my job now, I'll probably have to entertain offers before too long. Anything that better matches the offers to my skills and requirements is good, in my opinion.

      A few years ago, I was significantly underpaid. It was advantageous for me to have potential employers offer what I'm worth, rather than making an offer based on my current salary at the time. Had they known my salary, my take-home probably wouldn't have doubled the last two times I switched jobs.

      * Yes they always *ask* what your current salary is. You can answer "I'm looking for ...", because that's what they really.want to know - "how much will we have to pay you?"

      • by raymorris ( 2726007 ) on Monday June 25, 2018 @09:01PM (#56845808) Journal

        PS to my footnote - whenever a third-party recruiter calls me, I always ask about the budget for the position very early in the conversation. The recruiter won't be offended, and it saves them time as well as saving me time and if it's not in the range I'm looking for. If it IS in the right range, I have a good starting point for negotiation.

  • by fuzzyfuzzyfungus ( 1223518 ) on Monday June 25, 2018 @09:22PM (#56845876) Journal
    It's pretty shameless to use the term 'poaching'; when it specifically implies that the animal being hunted is the property of someone other than the hunter.

    Not that I'd ever suspect that HR sees us a prey animals who are owned by our feudal overlords or anything; that sort of negativity just isn't in keeping with company values.
    • by mikael ( 484 )

      I know of directors who consider "recruiting bright graduates is like trapping wild animals" or that "bright graduates just need a kick in the right direction". Or they call their technical experts "webheads" or "renderheads".

      • by Anonymous Coward

        To be fair, recent college grads need to be housebroken, and have at least since the late 90's. Plenty of talent, creativity and energy, but tend to mess all over the place and bite when confronted with actually finishing a project.

        • Not disagreeing but so do most managers, and it's worse. They usually have decades long habits of crapping all over the place.

    • I spent several months in my last role (which was tangential / partial management) trying to convince the other managers at my level and above me, to stop damn well referring to the staff as "resources" it was so dehumanising. They were just tools.

      I ended up failing to be honest, I never adopted the term myself but it's just too ingrained and these guys weren't even HR. Management think is pretty crap in regards to staff.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    What's wrong with a job market with liquidity? Make as much information about resources available and let the market for those resources sort it out. Bad for HR, good for workers as far as I can tell.

  • by Alain Williams ( 2972 ) <addw@phcomp.co.uk> on Tuesday June 26, 2018 @04:05AM (#56846604) Homepage

    This is use of personal data. Has linked in sought permission to use the data in this way and then share it with recruiters ?

  • by DrXym ( 126579 ) on Tuesday June 26, 2018 @04:49AM (#56846680)
    If you have to use the platform and you're not actively seeking work, the best thing you can do is unlink from every single recruiter you've linked with in the past and refuse further invites. If they're linked they can spam you with impunity and can see more detail of your own links

    If a recruiter is that keen to make contact they can send an InMail. They only get a limited number of InMail credits in a month so it acts as a deterrent unless they have something of high relevance. Responding to the InMail returns the credit so I don't do that either unless the recruiter actually works for the hiring firm. Anything that devalues LinkedIn is a good thing as far as I am concerned.

  • by jythie ( 914043 ) on Tuesday June 26, 2018 @05:25AM (#56846754)
    Eh, I think this kinda overestimates how nuanced recruiters are. I am skeptical that they will want to put in the extra effort to carefully match jobs to candidates through something sophisticated when they are not even using the full set of tools today. As far as I can tell the process usually seems to come down to 'oh, a high commission posting came up for a .Net developer, I'll spam everyone with 'net' in their profile!'. Targeted advertising has been the 'hope' of people trying to sell to marketers for decades, but at the end of the day dumb spamming is so cheap and low effort that it still rules.
  • If this analytics tool lives up to its promise, it would seem to offer more and better opportunities for ME the employee.

    Employers have been slowly eroding benefits for decades, because it "costs too much." Many of them forget that when you reduce costs somewhere, there are unintended consequences.

    This tool sounds like a good thing to me!

  • "Those are the king's stags, varlet!!"
  • Class Action Lawsuit? If I were an HR dept. and had the additional issue of dealing with poaches that came from LinkedIn, I'd be looking to coordinate with other companies in my industry to stop the practice. These days, due to the current economic madness, everyone is looking all the time. Adding additional pressure to move is deleterious to both the company in question and the person who may move to a job that is not what was promised. Regardless, LinkedIn's interest is in getting recruiters to sign on fo
    • by Shotgun ( 30919 )

      Who would you sue? People provide information about themselves voluntarily. Are you saying that employers should sue their employees for letting LinkedIn know where they worked and what skills they have?

  • I get dozens of calls weekly from cold-call recruiters who find my name on linkedin or indeed or whatever. Apparently they're incapable of reading anything else, since I get calls for:

    -- positions requiring active clearance, when my CV clearly says I don't.
    -- positions for SQL, network maintenance, embedded software, etc., for which I have nothing even close listed.
    -- insurance sales positions
    -- customer package pickup window positions (really)

    For the record, I'm a physicist w/ optics and radar experience,

    • by Average ( 648 )

      See, I keep hearing this "I'm always getting called" from other people and it just boggles my mind, because it's so different from my experience. I have a pretty fleshed-out public LinkedIn profile. Some stuff in GitHub (though 95% of my commits are in our enterprise gitlab). I've been doing this for quite a while (3-digit slashdot ID), but can cover a lot of modern hip buzzwords (Kubernetes, ElasticSearch, etc). And I get a recruiter e-mail about once a quarter, maybe, and a cold call generally less tha

  • What exactly is the objection to providing people with better information?
    Isn't it the people who decide what to do about that information?

    Last time I checked part of the point of a 'free market' included the idea that you had better be paying your employees enough (including intangables) that they are not so miserable doing their jobs that they feel like they need a different one. If someone makes them a better offer, that is the employers fault and those who offer better salaries should expect the better

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