Microsoft Corp. paid $26.2 billion for LinkedIn last year first and foremost to obtain its massive trove of information about the world’s working population. Today, the social network unveiled a new service designed to generate a return on that data more directly.

LinkedIn Talent Insights provides a visual interface that enables users to access a breakdown of different worker segments, starting with their own companies’ personnel. The service can display high-level statistics such as the number of hires made in a given period alongside more detailed information about areas that hold interest from a recruiting standpoint. Most notably, the console shows where employees go when they leave.

This feature enables companies to assess the extent to which rivals are poaching employees and check where they stand the other way around as well. For added measure, Talent Insights distills the individual departures into a panel that shows the employee groups with the highest attrition rate. The data from the service could help an organization take more timely action when a certain division starts experiencing personnel issues.

According to LinkedIn, the same features can be used to check how well competitors are doing. Users looking for an even broader market view in turn have access to a “Talent Pool” tab that visualizes patterns across the social network’s entire user base.

The tool is designed to help companies focus their recruiting efforts in the right place. A software-as-a-service provider looking to expand into a new country, for example, could use Talent Insights to identify the cities with the most inside sales professionals before deciding where to open a office. Search filters make it possible to customize the results down to the specific skills a recruiter is looking for.

Large enterprises that put particularly much effort into optimizing their hiring efforts can also uncover an extensive amount of background information. Talent Insights shows the universities that produce the most professionals in a given field, how those workers interact with a company’s LinkedIn page and where they’re employed.

According to Fast Company, LinkedIn plans to run a beta test with 20-25 companies of varying sizes before making Talent Insights generally available next year. Pricing is usually announced on launch in such cases.

Image: Ben Scholzen