LinkedIn has agreed to buy California-based HR software specialist Glint for an undisclosed sum.
The company, founded in 2013, has built up an enviable base of customers including AOL, FIS, NVIDIA and RioTinto.
It’s a reach that LinkedIn – itself bought by Microsoft in 2016 for $26.2 billion – acknowledged as among the attractions of the deal.
LinkedIn VP Daniel Shapero said in a post on the professional networking site: “Glint has an extensive customer base that uses it every day to help people accelerate their careers, and is loved and trusted by talent leaders.”
He added: “Glint’s mission to help people be happier and more successful at work aligns perfectly with LinkedIn’s mission to connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful.”
What does Glint Do Exactly?
The company’s employee engagement platform allows corporate users to monitor a range of metrics pertaining to employee attentiveness, including response rate to emails and “alertness”.
It uses machine learning, natural language processing and predictive analytics to analyse regular surveys.
“Glint’s AI-for-HR™ technology uses predictive analytics and machine learning to generate real-time alerts for employee populations at risk of increased attrition, decreased performance or changes to other key performance indicators.”
It’s range of tools also includes “Glint Narrative Intelligence”, a natural language processing (NLP) engine that helps analyse qualitative feedback.
This “infer sentiment and categorize underlying patterns in the data into topics based on Glint’s multi-level organizational development taxonomy, enabling a consistent, thematic understanding of employee feedback”.
Glint had previously raised raised a total of $79.5 million in funding over five rounds, with its last series D round in November 2017 valuing it at
LinkedIn Glint Deal: Where’s the Value?
LinkedIn’s Shapero said: “Imagine, through our combined offerings, that we can translate the specific feedback a manager gets from their employees on Glint into a personalized LinkedIn Learning experience focused on the topics that will help them improve, thus making the feedback much more actionable
He added: “With LinkedIn’s insights into the larger workforce alongside Glint’s internal view into employee engagement and skills, we will be able to help talent leaders answer all those difficult questions.”
At close, Glint CEO and founder Jim Barnett will report to Shapero, and Glint will operate as a team within LinkedIn so that they can “maintain and accelerate business momentum.”
All other Glint executives will continue to report to Jim Barnett with the exception of HR, finance, information security, and legal, who will join the functional teams at LinkedIn.
