LinkedIn Corp. is trying to cash in on the data it has gathered from its 575 million worldwide members, 20 million companies and 15 million job listings with a new service for companies to learn more about themselves, their competitors and the talent they want to attract.

The Talent Insights service, launched Tuesday, essentially marks LinkedIn’s first foray into the world of business intelligence, helping business leaders and executives to make more informed decisions when it comes to hiring new talent.

LinkedIn announced the service last year, and has spent the last 12 months testing the product with early adopters in order to get it right. It says there are now 100 companies using Talent Insights for human resources, recruitment and marketing purposes.

There are two aspects to Talent Insights, including a “Talent Pool” that’s focused on people working for a particular company and a “Company Report” that compiles data on specific organizations.

The Talent Pool allows users to run searches across LinkedIn’s database in order to find talent with the characteristics they’re looking for, and also figure out where that talent is working at present.

“For example, let’s say you need to hire a product developer in the consumer goods industry,” Eric Owski, a product manager at LinkedIn, wrote in a blog post. “When you generate the report, you’ll see an overview that includes how many total professionals there are with a background in product development and the top cities where they live.”

One interesting feature of the tool is that it also helps companies to spot lesser known talents who “might be on the way up,” based on the skills they possess and their career statistics.

As for the Company Report, it provides an analytics profile for users’ organizations, allowing them to compare this against other companies in areas such as the skills they possess and the education level of their workforce.

“For example, let’s say ‘Flexis’ is your competitor,” Owski wrote. “When you generate the Company Report, you can see an overview of Flexis’ workforce composition, talent flow, attrition, skill inventory, employee education, and more.”

The launch of Talent Insights is noteworthy because it continues a trend at LinkedIn of launching services that are helping it to evolve beyond merely being just a business-oriented social network. These days it’s almost a kind of productivity platform, offering ways for employees to plan commutes to potential jobs, various training courses and several integrations with its owner Microsoft Corp.’s software.

LinkedIn said Talent Insights is up and running now, with more information including pricing details available here.

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