Dive Brief:
- With yesterday's announcement that tech behemoth Microsoft expects to own LinkedIn by year-end 2016 for $26.2 billion, HR leaders nationwide are no doubt wondering what the deal's impact would be on HR departments overall.
- Of course, there will be some tie-in to recruiting, since part of LinkedIn's value (433 million members globally) is directly tied to talent sourcing.
- An article at ZDNet, however, speculates that the critical reason for Microsoft's purchase is that it could be the beginning of the company's attempt to break into the human capital management (HCM) software application space, competing with the likes of giants such as WorkDay, SAP, Oracle and others.
Dive Insight:
Author Larry Dignan, ZDNet's editor-in-chief, lays out a scenario whereby Microsoft can take LinkedIn's main components of "social heft, a network of business pros, leads for its business and touch points to every person looking to be productive" and turn it into an HCM solution.
It won't be easy, he writes, but he refers to what CEO Satya Nadella left out of his memo to Microsoft employees - that Microsoft is hungry to become a predator in the HR application food chain.
On a conference call with reporters, Nadella said HCM software was "a very exciting opportunity for us." He added that the combination of Office 365, LinkedIn and Dynamics (a CRM app) will morph into "HCM with talent management telemanagement solutions and recruiting from LinkedIn. Those to me are the formative things that we can now do."
Dignam's writes that "Microsoft HCM won't be too far behind."
Of course, not everyone sees the deal in such lofty ways, especially one observer who sees this as the next version of "Clippy," the notorious (and extinct) MS Office paperclip cartoon helper.
