Meet Tom Laine, Internationally Acclaimed LinkedIn Expert

Tom Laine has spent more than a decade helping HR and marketing teams get the most out of LinkedIn as a recruitment and employer branding channel. Based in Finland, he works with organizations across Europe and beyond as a social recruitment trainer, employer branding consultant, and LinkedIn educator. His Employer Branding Workbook, released in April 2026, brings those frameworks into a single practical resource for HR and marketing professionals.

This conversation was part of the AllVoices State of Employee Feedback Series, originally conducted in 2021. His argument is that HR cannot prove its value without measurement, and that a strong employer brand depends entirely on a trustworthy internal feedback culture. Both observations have only become more relevant since.

Tom Laine on what HR needs to change

Laine's view of the HR function is structural: the problem is not individual effort but the breadth of what HR is asked to own without sufficient resources or clear priorities.

What does the state of the HR industry look like today?

For Laine, the core dysfunction in HR is a resource problem masquerading as a capability problem.

"HR is cluttered with tasks, often split between serving the internal organisation with organisational development, leadership support, culture creation, payroll, lay-offs, training, planning, developing the employee experience, and what-not, whereas the other part of the job is to serve external audiences, manage recruitment marketing and job advertising, building up employer brand, joining recruitment events, running hiring days at educational institutes, and more, while trying to keep up with legislative changes, new technical tools and software, and who knows what else. This is all too much for any individual, even HR teams as a whole are struggling to find time and resources to manage this all and more. It's time for HR to change. HR needs to find their real purpose again, and to prove their worth to the top management to have access to the resources they need to build up the most valuable asset an organisation has: it's employees. The industry as a whole has a lot to prove!"

The employee relations function sits at the center of this problem. When HR is stretched across employer branding, legal compliance, payroll administration, and culture-building simultaneously, the work that requires the most depth gets squeezed out: hearing employees, acting on their concerns, and following through.

How Tom Laine connects employee feedback to employer brand

Laine's perspective on feedback is distinct from a typical HR practitioner's: he sees it primarily as employer brand data. How a company responds to internal employee input shapes what it eventually signals externally.

What are the most common challenges when managing employee feedback?

"I personally don't deal with employee feedback and reporting as such, but I see it being a key to developing the organisation, the employee experience, and through that the employer brand. eNPS (Employee Net Promoter Score) and likes are one of those metrics that are becoming a tool of the trade to manage the employee expectation, the day to day employee experience, and helping to understand what needs to be done to improve several aspects of it - such as working environment, tools, culture, values, leadership etc."

The connection he draws matters. Employee engagement strategies that produce real signal, rather than survey theater, depend on employees believing their input will go somewhere. That belief is what converts feedback data into employer brand credibility.

How to build a feedback culture that employees actually trust

When Laine advises organizations on improving their feedback culture, he focuses on sequence: culture of openness first, then collection, then action, then external visibility. Tools are the last consideration, not the first.

What advice do you have for organizations looking to improve their feedback culture?

"Tools are one thing, but internal communication is the key. It would be easy to just pick one of those fancy tech tools to create feedback loops and automated feedback collecting, reporting and analysis, but tech should never be in focus, it's just means to access the quiet data that employees all feel and even base their actions on. My advice would be to first of all create a culture of openness (communication channels and trust), that people feel safe and secure to talk about anything that might burden their minds. Second thing would then be to collect that data into actionable points and priorities, how to improve any of the upcoming aspects, or to leverage the power of it, the positive aspects of the feedback. Leadership and values are often at the very core of it. How do we communicate that employees have been heard, and that we're working to improve all and any aspects that come up. And eventually, how do we make it visible to external audiences, that we are the kind of an organisation that treats employees with this level of love and respect, and acts upon issues fast and firmly."

His sequencing reflects what the research confirms: building a reporting culture that works requires trust before it requires technology. Organizations that skip the trust-building step and go straight to implementation end up with tools that produce low-quality data because employees have learned not to use them honestly.

What the future HR function needs to become

Laine's vision for HR involves structural disaggregation: pulling its diverse responsibilities into cross-functional roles that sit closer to where the work actually happens, and making the results measurable.

What does the future of HR look like?

"The future of HR might well be to separate typical HR responsibilities into different sub-roles and joint roles with other operations, such as externally focused employer branding activities into joint operation with marketing, internal communications joint with HR's culture-building activities, payroll and legislative issues with the finance operations, and more. HR - just like any other function within an organisation - can not operate alone, in a silo of its own. We need cross-functional teams and information sharing, joint operations with many typically separate functions. We can't afford to see sales, marketing, comms, HR, etc. as separate functions, even if separated in organisational structures. HR also needs to prove its worth to the top management to have access to the kind of resources it needs, and that means metrifying HR operations, to create ways to measure the impact of hiring, firing, building the employer brand or improving the culture. What does it cost and what is the ROI of it all? If we can't measure our impact, how can we expect to get the required resources to do our job now and in the future? Only numbers can prove our worth, and HR's worth is huge. It is sitting on top of the only thing we can build our organisation's success upon: our ability to attract and keep the best and most innovative workforce in our industry."

The case for HR analytics he makes is not abstract. The teams that can quantify the cost of unwanted attrition, the time-to-productivity gap in new hires, or the reduction in ER case volume after investing in feedback infrastructure are the teams that get budget in the next cycle.

How do you see your role evolving over the next 3-5 years?

"I personally don't see much change in my job, as HR tends to move slowly. I wish it didn't, but it does. Always has. So, I'll just keep my head down and keep working my butt off, trying to change the industry from within, one organisation, one case, one training at a time."

Five years later, that assessment still holds. LinkedIn as a platform has changed dramatically. The pace of HR's structural evolution has not kept up.

Where employer branding and HR measurement stand in 2025 and 2026

Laine gave this interview when LinkedIn had just crossed 750 million users and employer branding was beginning to formalize as a discipline. Both have shifted considerably since.

LinkedIn has become the primary infrastructure for employer brand

LinkedIn now has more than 1 billion members globally, with its AI-powered job matching and Skills Graph reshaping how candidates discover companies before they ever apply. According to LinkedIn's 2025 Employer Brand research, companies with strong employer brands see 50% more qualified applicants and a 28% reduction in cost-per-hire. The channel Laine built his practice around is now foundational infrastructure, not a competitive edge.

eNPS and HR measurement have moved from best practice to expectation

The eNPS metric Laine cited as "becoming a tool of the trade" in 2021 is now a baseline expectation in most mid-size and enterprise HR functions. The harder challenge, which his interview anticipated, is connecting internal feedback data to business outcomes in a way that earns budget and leadership attention. That is exactly where structured company culture tools and case management give HR teams the evidence layer they need. See how AllVoices works for HR teams building that kind of measurable, accountable feedback infrastructure.