As companies struggle to find employees, many are looking internally to fill open roles.
Among a slew of new feature releases, LinkedIn on Wednesday revealed options that promote internal candidates to recruiters and help employees identify career goals and develop skills to reach them.
“Today’s leaders need to embrace internal mobility and make it part of their holistic hiring strategy. This lies not only in making internal hiring the norm — encouraging recruiting teams and hiring managers to tap into the qualified talent pool they already have to fill open roles — but also creating internal growth pathways that align with employees’ career goals,” Hari Srinivasan, vice president of product at LinkedIn, said in a blog post announcing the new features.
On LinkedIn Recruiter, the company created a new spotlight for internal candidates, and on the LinkedIn Learning Hub, LinkedIn is featuring open jobs at a worker’s company. The Learning Hub also gives employees an option to set career goals, assess their skills and follow day-to-day role guides for positions they might be interested in. To start, LinkedIn is offering role guides for 17 of the most in-demand roles on the site, such as project manager and software engineer, but plans to add dozens more in the next few months that can be customized by an employer, Srinivasan said.
Employers that fail to make internal hiring processes fair could drive employees away, a Gartner study from February said. Many employees are searching for new opportunities outside of their organizations instead of internally in part due to perceived unfairness, the report noted, but to fix this, employers need to make internal opportunities more clearly available.
The new features are part of a wider effort by LinkedIn to better customize options for job seekers and employers. Earlier this year, the company introduced Diversity Nudges, which filters recommendations for recruiters to improve diversity, and gives workplaces a section on their LinkedIn pages to show their emphasis on diversity, sustainability, career development and work-life balance, among other things. The company also gave workers the ability to tie the skills on their profile to their education, jobs and certifications to prioritize skill-based hiring.
