LinkedIn acquires Glint to help users track employee engagement

LinkedIn today announced its intent to acquire Glint, a self-described employee engagement company, in order to help its users better track satisfaction within their own organizations. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

“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,” LinkedIn vice president of talent solutions Daniel Shapero wrote in a blog post. According to the post, LinkedIn was a customer of Glint’s before the acquisition. Other customers included United and Intuit, but it’s unclear how many customers total Glint had.

According to TechCrunch, which first reported on the news, the team from Glint will continue to work under the Microsoft-owned LinkedIn, and Glint will not be shutting down its existing services while it transitions. Founded in 2013 and headquartered in Redwood City, California, Glint had raised nearly $80 million from investors including Bessemer Venture Partners, Meritech Capital Partners, and Norwest Venture Partners.

Using the Glint platform, businesses send out regular surveys to employees that can be completed within a matter of minutes. Glint’s software then helps its customers track these results over time, seeing in which departments employee engagement has fallen or risen, and gives them action steps to improve engagement. Glint also uses predictive analytics and machine learning to alert companies when a certain department or group of employees might be at risk of leaving the company in the near future, due to falling satisfaction scores.

With nearly 600 million users, LinkedIn has been selling its latest offerings on the fact that it has more information about what kind of skills today’s talent has — and what they look for in a job — than almost any other professional networking sites.

Earlier this year, LinkedIn rolled out Talent Insights, a self-serve analytics tool that gives HR teams insights into where their competitors are recruiting from, what cities would offer them a highly skilled talent pool for a new office, and what skills their current employee base is lacking.

The Glint acquisition will give LinkedIn a solid footing into the next part of the talent acquisition lifecycle — how to keep skilled employees happy once they’ve taken the job — as well as another enterprise-level platform to charge businesses for.

The deal is expected to close during the second fiscal quarter of 2019.