LinkedIn, the social networking platform in the working world owned by Microsoft, has leveraged its role as a repository of professional profiles, establishing itself as a trusted platform in job hunting and recruitment.
The company has now amassed more than 20 million job listings — up from just 300,000 five years ago — and sees its 600 million users apply to jobs a combined 25 million times a week. That activity also translates into big business: paid memberships specifically for recruiters, premium user accounts, job ads, and more contribute to LinkedIn’s bottom line, with revenue of $6.4 billion in 2019, up 27% in the most recent quarter.
Now, LinkedIn is stepping up its game. After a two-year effort, LinkedIn is announcing today that it has finally completed its work and is rolling out a series of new features for both job seekers and employers.
On the jobs side, they include instant job alerts, a redesign of the jobs homepage, and more salary information available to all users (including free users), with brief skill assessments.
On the recruiting front, LinkedIn Jobs, Recruiter, and Pipeline Builder all come together to create a more seamless way to manage how you post ads, search for candidates, and of course, interact with them during the hiring process.
“This will mean higher-quality candidates, better jobs and better fit,” said the company’s VP John Jersin in an interview. When asked why it took so long to integrate these tools — and why the process didn’t happen five years ago — he said it was more a consequence of evolving expectations as technology evolved .
“We designed these systems in a way that worked well, but no one could predict what we would need in the future,” he said.
The new features LinkedIn is bringing to job seekers are very interesting. It notes that job seekers who respond to ads faster than others are more likely to get a job, so if a job is posted now and you meet the search criteria, you could be getting noticed within minutes. Meanwhile, the redesigned Jobs homepage is more mobile-friendly, with additional search features that take into account how people navigate on mobile devices.
Skills assessments, meanwhile, seem to me to be a direct response to the many new innovations we’ve seen among e-learning companies and recruiting, with companies like Coursera and Triplebyte giving people more tools to understand what they need to showcase in the job market and what suits them best. LinkedIn notes that they can also be used by individuals to validate their skills – for example, long-term unemployed people with long gaps in their resumes.
The steps are very important for the company, but there are still many opportunities for small and newer businesses to gain a lot from LinkedIn's activities in areas where growth is still slow.
For example, we’ve seen the emergence of interested, more targeted startups that focus on, for example, racially diverse hiring (as in the case of Handshake) or that focus on, for example, women returning to work after giving birth (as in the case of Project Mom). While LinkedIn has made some very small steps in this area, it could partner with others to raise the bar.
“This is a difficult and multifaceted problem,” Jersin said, “but LinkedIn is committed to trying to solve it.” He said the company has quietly begun working on ways to get more information that “could be more useful.” “The most important thing is the sense of trust,” he said, noting it as the most significant challenge to be addressed online. “I think we’re very fortunate to be one of the few companies out there that can say we’re using this information responsibly, for the benefit of the job seeker.”
