Your Next Employee May Be Your Current Employee: How LinkedIn Can Boost Your Internal Hiring

With organizations bracing for an economic downturn, companies are adapting how they run and grow their businesses to focus on the highest priority areas — with internal mobility, skill development, and the ability to hire based on skills and shared values at the core of their strategies. To maximize the full potential of their workforce, employers are taking a closer look at sourcing open roles internally: 25% of recruiters at our largest customers are already using tools on LinkedIn to support internal hiring.*

HR plays a critical role in helping organizations become more agile amidst uncertainty, as our CEO, Ryan Roslansky, shared at our 11th annual Talent Connect event this morning. To help, we’re making it easier for talent leaders to foster a culture of internal hiring and career development by launching new features across the LinkedIn hiring and learning products they already use.

Making it easier for people to find a job internally than externally

When top and tenured talent leave our companies, we feel the impact more than ever. The loss of skills, knowledge, and relationships tend to hit hybrid and remote teams especially hard. 

One of the top drivers of employee attrition is a lack of advancement opportunities. When employees feel their skills aren’t being put to good use in their current job, they are 10x more likely to be job hunting.

To address this, 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. 

Today, we’re making it easier for: 

Organizations to find qualified internal candidates for open jobs with a new spotlight for internal candidates in LinkedIn Recruiter:

Employees to find open jobs aligned to their career goals at their company within LinkedIn Learning Hub, our skill-building platform they’re already using for professional growth:

And as an early test, we’re surfacing open jobs at a member’s current employer in the LinkedIn Jobs tab.

More companies are making internal mobility a priority not only to improve workforce agility, but also to boost retention: employees who have made an internal move have a 75% chance of staying at their company after two years; that drops to 56% for employees who haven’t. 

Equipping employees to take career development into their own hands

To move forward in their careers, employees need to know: What new skills do they need to build? What skills need a boost? What skills are their greatest strengths? And how do they find the right learning content to get where they are trying to go?

After all, the skills people need to succeed in their job are changing rapidly: skill sets for jobs have changed by around 25% since 2015. By 2027, this number is expected to double. Employees need a solution that not only addresses who they are today, but who they want to be tomorrow — a solution that starts with employees themselves.

That’s why we are rolling out several new features within LinkedIn Learning Hub to make it easier for organizations to provide the support, clarity, and direction we know employees crave when it comes to building skills to advance their career goals, all powered by real-time, global skills data. 

First, we’re providing even more personalized skill building by giving employees the ability to specify their goals and receive tailored learning recommendations to help them advance in their careers. 

Once they’ve set their goals, we’re empowering individuals to assess their skill strengths and gaps in order to guide their learning with Skill Evaluations across 42 hard and soft skills. By breaking down a skill into parts, learners can pinpoint exact focus areas within a skill and easily find learning content at their level. 

We’re also making career pathing easier, allowing employees to immerse themselves in a role that might be outside their day-to-day with Role Guides. With relevant content, communities, precertifications, and other resources, they can get a better understanding of the skills they need for specific roles and start building them. We’re starting with 17 of the most in-demand roles on our platform, like project manager and software engineer, and in the next couple of months, we’ll be rolling out dozens more with the ability for organizations to customize role guides to meet the specific needs of their organization. 

These new features within LinkedIn Learning Hub give organizations a powerful way to engage employees in discovering new opportunities and upskilling for new roles. Learning Hub meets learners where they are every day, delivering curated content and recommendations personalized to their career and organization’s goals.

Hiring the right people — faster — based on what matters to them

While it’s true your next employee may be your current employee, being able to pinpoint the right talent externally is still a necessity. We find the criteria you use to hire people has a big influence on the type of culture you create. That’s why we’ve made a number of updates to help you efficiently find and attract the right talent.

First, we focused on helping hiring managers put less emphasis on traditional proxies like degrees and more on finding talent whose current skills match the role. Earlier this year, we brought skills to the forefront, giving members the ability to associate the skills listed on their profile to their education, jobs, or the certifications they’ve earned. We also empowered hirers to easily search and filter for candidates who best match their skill requirements, combining skills information from both members’ resumes and profiles into one place in Recruiter. 

We also introduced features to help recruiters build a more diverse workforce, empowering them to increase the representation of women or men in their talent pools and mitigate unconscious biases as they look for their next hire. 

Now we’re going a step further, aiming to help organizations better attract and hire talent based on shared values by adding a Commitments feature on Company Pages. The new feature allows organizations to highlight the specific commitments they’ve made in five key areas: diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI); environmental sustainability; social impact; career growth and learning; and work-life balance. This will help employers showcase their company culture and attract qualified candidates who are looking to assess if a company might be a good fit.

To compete today, organizations need solutions that support their hiring and career development strategies more holistically, better connecting learning, career development, and internal hiring. Thinking differently about the criteria you use to hire the right people — and then working with your existing talent to build new skills to help them thrive — can help organizations weather any economic cycle.

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