LinkedIn acquires employee engagement and retention platform Glint
LinkedIn, the social network for the working world with close to 600 million users and now under the wing of Microsoft, has announced an acquisition as it continues to work on expanding the ways that people already on the platform use it. It has acquired Glint, a startup that provides employment engagement and retention services for businesses and other organizations.
Terms of the deal are not being disclosed. For some context, Glint had raised nearly $80 million — including these rounds for $27 million and and $20 million in the last two years — was valued at around $220 million in its last round according to PitchBook.
The news was announced both by LinkedIn and Glint itself in blog posts.
Daniel Shapero, VP of Talent Solutions at LinkedIn, said that the team from Glint will join LinkedIn and continue to work as a salient entity within it under current Glint CEO and founder Jim Barnett.
One big focus for LinkedIn over the years has been how to expand the amount of engagement — and therefore revenue — it derives from paying customers, and in particular businesses that are on its platform. Today some of LinkedIn’s revenue generating products include premium memberships, recruitment (Talent Soutions) and education, by way of Lynda.com. Glint is another step ahead in that wider strategy to build out more services for those users, alongside existing branches like education and CRM tools.
And the blog post from Shapero is another indication of how this will fit into LinkedIn: today a business might use LinkedIn for recruitment. Now, tomorrow, it can continue to use LinkedIn for more services around those employees once they have been hired, with Glint’s current list of products including Employee Engagement, Employee Lifecycle, Manager Effectiveness, and Team Effectiveness.
LinkedIn has already been building out solutions to help employees with their career development (for example with its educational products), and this will play a similar role on the company-wide front.
“We believe that Glint has uncovered a modern HR best practice that every company should do: Regularly gather employee feedback on work, culture, and leadership, and give leaders the tools they need to translate those insights into action,” Shapero writes. “At LinkedIn, as a customer of Glint, we’ve experienced the value that this brings first-hand. Glint provides executives with the tools to answer questions about the health and happiness of the talent they have, while giving managers at all levels the access and insight they need to improve.”
It looks like Glint might be shutting down its existing service, or at least transitioning current customers to its platform under LinkedIn, which now will be able to cross-sell other services to them. We’re contacting the companies to confirm what will happen.
More to come.
