Blog: Valuing Employee Data using Public Data Sources

Sunil Soares
CEO & Founder

Every company has employees. Every employee record contains data. So, how would you value employee data?In June 2016, Microsoft acquired LinkedIn for $26.2 billion for an implied value of approximately $60 per candidate record. We multiplied this implied value per candidate record by the number of employees to calculate the implied value of employee data for various publicly-traded companies in the United States (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: Employee data valuation for publicly-traded companies in the United States.
A few caveats to this analysis:

  • We valued employee data, not the value of employees (the value of an employee is presumably greater than the value of their data)
  • The employee data valuation is only for the types of information that would typically appear on LinkedIn (which is a fraction of the types of information that a company would have on its employees)
  • This is more of a tops-down approach to data valuationA bottoms-up approach to employee data valuation might consider incremental revenue streams, reduced costs and risk mitigation from improved employee data
  • For example, improved employee data might grow revenues through better succession planning and identifying high-performers
  • Alternatively, cybersecurity teams might tie employee data with other information such as email traffic to identify insider threats


These insights are enabled by YDC’s Recommendation Engine, which ties internal and external data sources to drive data monetization insights. For more information, please visit www.yourdataconnect.com.
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