LinkedIn Wants to Make More Money From Job Recruiters

LinkedIn, the social network for businesspeople, is adding on to its biggest business: matching jobs to job seekers.

The company is announcing an addition to its hiring solutions business called Talent Pipeline at a conference for 1,500 job recruiters and personnel executives in Las Vegas on Tuesday. Pipeline is an effort to centralize the way recruiters find, track and stay in touch with potential hires and promotions. The product is intended to be used with candidates internally and outside the company. Employees, the company says, can more easily find out about job openings for themselves or candidates they know.

The company considers the recruiting industry as a fragmented global market worth $85 billion.

Not surprisingly, the Talent Pipeline also enables recruiters to connect the names on a résumé to their LinkedIn profiles. The idea is to enable them to build a bigger internal database with more information in it, including notes on a candidate that the hiring managers can share with each other, thus making LinkedIn more important to them.

“Most of the people you want to hire are in jobs where they are already happy – that’s why there are headhunters calling people up,” said Jeff Weiner, LinkedIn’s chief executive. But independent recruiters, with their personal networks and spreadsheets of candidates, tend to be specialized and incapable of looking globally for a lot of jobs, he said. “They don’t scale. We find when you unleash a search capability at scale you start looking through more variables, like geography, languages spoken, related fields and work history.”

The Pipeline will be introduced next year as part of the current service, called the Recruiter platform. It will also be available separately, though LinkedIn has not yet set a price for the service.

Building on hiring solutions is a big deal for LinkedIn. In the quarter that ended last June, the company made $58.6 million from Hiring Solutions, up 170 percent from a year earlier. That was 48 percent of the company’s total revenue, and its fastest-growing segment. LinkedIn’s second-biggest business is advertising, and it brought in $38.6 million. LinkedIn is a free service, but people pay premiums for things like access to anyone’s professional information; these premium subscriptions brought in $23.9 million.

Besides offering another reason to use the recruiting software, the company is looking to increase the time people spend interacting with its products, hoping it will also be used to structure how people work as well as how they get hired.

Some 6,000 companies use Hiring Solutions. LinkedIn is sharing parts of its database with partners like Success Factors, which makes software for planning and carrying out complex tasks, to build more uses for the talent data.

“We look at LinkedIn as an ecosystem or a platform,” Mr. Weiner said. “It’s not just about finding a job, it’s about helping people be great at the job they are in – they want to provide intelligence, participate in professional groups and share knowledge, share their expertise.”

Source from : NY Times