Do you need LinkedIn's Talent Solutions Service?

When LinkedIn first introduced it's Hiring Solutions product back in 2008 (I think), my crew and I evaluated the product only to find it disappointingly expensive with minimal bang for our buck.  After reading this informative article (http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/05/05/linkedin-talent-solution/) on LinkedIn's Talent Solutions service, I was intrigued enough to request a demo.  After all, if it represents 57% of their revenue, it's got to have some serious bells and whistles, right?

LTS, as I'll refer to it from here on out, sits on top of your personal profile - meaning that the interface is basically the same.  When you search for people, the search results still show to what degree you are connected to them and some highlights of their profile.  What you get with the addition of LTS are search results that are not limited by your connections.  So for example, if you have a small personal network and do a search for a "Network Administrator," you may only get a few results that are first, second and third degree connections (up to second degree with a basic account).  With LTS, the demo showed 729,000 results because it searched all 225 million profiles regardless of personal connections.  I can see how this would be helpful for recruiters who are new to LinkedIn yet are competing for the same talent with recruiters who have larger personal networks (I have 23k at the time of this post).  I ran the same search after my demo to see how my search results compared to LTS's.  I also had 729,000 results, so there was no benefit for me there.

LTS gives you a second inbox in order to separate your personal use of LinkedIn from your business use.  With LTS, you get 50 InMails per month (which can accumulate up to three months worth) which you can use to bulk email people that you select from your searches.  With a free personal account, you don't get any InMails.  With a Business account, Business Plus account and Executive Account, you get 3, 10, and 25 InMails per month respectively that also accumulate, but you aren't able to bulk email without LTS.  I don't send InMail often, but this could be reason enough to purchase LTS if you spend a lot of time proactively recruiting on LinkedIn.  In fact, one of the selling points mentioned in my demo was that LTS allows you to get away from job board subscriptions (think Monster and Careerbuilder).

A few other minor features: With LTS, you can save profiles to folders and therefore have limited ATS functionality.  You can import spreadsheets with candidate information and your imported information will show up in future searches.  I couldn't really see the benefit to this, but maybe that's due to my setup.  If you save searches, you can get alerts when new people join LinkedIn that match your saved criteria - helpful if you frequently hire the same skill sets but don't have the time or interest to do regular searches.  You can do this without LTS, but you're limited in the number of saved searches you can have (3, 5, 7, 10/week depending on subscription level).

My rep spent some time telling me about job postings, but there didn't appear to be a difference between how they work with LTS and if I bought them with a personal account.

The cost of an annual LTS subscription is $8,700 for a single user.  Bottom line - if you want to be a LinkedIn power user but only have a small personal network, this is great solution.  If LinkedIn is just one of your tools and your personal network is large enough to give you good access to talent, you can get by with a free account or one of the premium accounts.

Recommendation 1:  Keep growing your personal network - especially in your field.  The larger your network, the less your need for LTS.

Recommendation 2:  Identify which sources are generating the bulk of your hires.  If it's LinkedIn, you may be able to save money by purchasing LTS and dropping traditional job boards.