

LinkedIn Wants Users to Connect More - grellas
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704905704574622191027266548.html?mod=WSJ_hps_sections_careerjournal

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jeffmould
I view LinkedIn solely as an online resume site. I believe a better route for
LinkedIn would be to compete with Monster.com or CareerBuilder and build a
social networking job site. With all the "resumes" currently stored on
LinkedIn it is probably one of, if not the largest, holders of personal
job/work experience in the world.

A business idea would be to create a mashup of sorts pulling information from
users profiles and matching them with potential career opportunities on a job
board site. LinkedIn could then charge a premium for providing the user and/or
the company with a list of potential job opportunities and/or potential
candidates. Taking it one step further would be to incorporate some form of
background check/education verification into the platform for the companies. A
user could select whether they are open to receive job postings or be included
in job searches by companies. They could also select which types of companies
they want to be included in. I am sure that LinkedIn could develop some sort
of algorithm to provide benefit to the job seeking users while at the same
time reducing potential spam in the users inbox.

Taking the idea one step further would be to charge a fee for resume
assistance in helping users build their profiles to highlight current and past
experiences. Many times I know (myself included) that users just list the
company name/job title and do not include what they did at the company.

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jedc
LinkedIn should let users post an online "portfolio" of their work. This would
be hugely useful for designers, but could be extrapolated to a general
solution for everyone. Programmers could link to Github repos and/or
production projects. I'd love to show the photos and news coverage of the
solar car I built and raced back at University...

This could be relatively straightforward to do and could be hugely valuable
for both job-seekers AND employers looking for candidates.

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jamesbritt
Can't you already post links now? Isn't it better to link to a site that does
a good job of hosting portfolios instead on expecting LinedIn to handle that
well?

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jedc
I think you can post three links.

Considering the full potential of the web (cheap storage and easy access) why
is LinkedIn still limiting itself to just textual information? I'm not
expecting them to do it, but it would be a natural extension to their current
business.

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petewarden
> turns a profit from ads and _recruitment services_

I spent a lot of time working on a startup in a related space, and came to
realize that the real customers of LinkedIn are the recruiters. As long as
they can get you to enter your details, they can get thousands of dollars a
year from individual recruiters for access to your information.

Look at their site as a service for recruiters which happens to require
consumer input. They want you to be promiscuous in your connections, since
weak-but-wide links are more effective for recruiting than strong-but-narrow
'true friendships'. They don't have much incentive to drive users to interact
with the site, beyond keeping their details up-to-date.

It sounds like they're interested in becoming more compelling to consumers,
but I wonder how deep that commitment goes when there's no immediate revenue
stream from it?

Here's one older article that discusses LinkedIn's revenue model:
<http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/18/technology/18linkedin.html>

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catfish
Use the News and Discussion features of linked in to drive traffic to client
Wordpress blog articles. It's a soft sell mechanism, a gateway for offers on
the blog page. I am always pleased with the quality targeted traffic I get
through this process.

If your tired of paying for $1.00 click thrus, the silly keyword scoring BS,
rampant competitor click fraud, and not knowing anything about your traffic
unless it converts, switch tactics.

I don't give a hoot about how Linked In makes its buck. A free account allows
you to join 50 groups. If you setup a profile aimed at your target demo, and
then join the right groups, you can post a weekly blog article notice that
gets seen by 250k+ real human beings that actually converse about the topics
you write about.

If you are a smart cookie you can leverage low cost labor for about $25 a week
to write the article, post the notice across 50 groups, and average about 5000
real nice visitors a week. No click fraud, engaged readers, 1-2% conversions
for your paying adv's. What would the same 20,000 clicks cost you on Google?

That's what Linked In is good for...

And Twitter too...

Facebook, not so much...

Facebook is useless for this, as a personal account maxes at 5k. Useless.

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timcederman
If LinkedIn want greater engagement, they need to start offering professional
functionality that is useful on a day to day basis. LinkedIn Answers is okay,
but they would do very well to partner with StackOverflow (or do their own
take on the StackExchange platform) for example.

Offering tools like TripIt is a good start. They should try and expand their
applications to things like expense tracking, etc, while also doing a better
job of making the applications visible and useful.

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ams6110
Agree, I find that LinkedIn does little for me. I'm not in sales or marketing,
and I'm not currently looking for a job. There's just no reason for me to log
in to LinkedIn daily, or with any real frequency at all.

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gaius
What I have never understood about LinkedIn: If I am looking for a new job,
why would I want my current cow-orkers, including managers at my current
employer, to know about it? Keeping your profile up to date is one thing;
soliciting recommendations from current cow-orkers is a broad hint and setting
your status to be "is looking for a new job" is blatant. How can it possibly
work?

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pjhyett
I heard an interesting story that Yahoo pays LinkedIn lots of money to figure
out which of their employees are looking to leave in order to offer incentives
to get them to stay.

Certainly, employers could do the opposite with that information and let you
go, but that's about as simple of a way to get a raise as I could think of
(assuming your the type of employee they want to keep around).

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aseidman
Competing with CareerBuilder and Monster is a waste of time. Both of these
sites will eventually become irrelevant -- searching for a job by typing in a
few keywords is unnatural. People hear about jobs thru friends, professional
acquaintances, work product (GitHub, StackOverflow, etc), and local businesses
(signs) and as LinkedIn becomes more prevalent they will grab more then their
fair share of this market without trying very hard.

The far bigger opportunity for LinkedIn is to aggregate business leads. Are
you looking to outfit your company with new laptops this year, looking for a
block of hotel rooms for a conference, looking for an event management
company, looking to upgrade accounting systems. Each of these leads is worth
hundreds of dollars and helping businesses find good vendors is not easy
(consultants make billions of dollars/yr making vendor recommendations).

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byrneseyeview
The existence of the recruiting industry belies that claim. The job market is
incredibly inefficient: I would bet that no professional in a big city could
name more than 10% of the people who would be willing to employ him at that
moment.

Most of the jobs I see and hear about are of no interest to me; I can search
careerbuilder (or LinkedIn) and instantly find some jobs that are relevant.

~~~
aseidman
The recruiting industry will not go away, but sites like CareerBuilder and
Monster as major players within the recruiting industry will. The value of
matching job seekers to jobs is far more efficient within LinkedIn.

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aurora72
If Linked-In ever wants us to connect more often, first they should lower
their subscription prices. At $25/month, it's a rip-off, and without a
subscription the site looks useless and is not worth visiting too often.

I'm currently subscribed to the rival social networking site Xing.com at about
5.5 EUR/month and satisified with the service being provided.

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pohl
A social site bending over backwards to be perfectly devoid of fun. Is it any
wonder the users don't interact more?

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aseidman
Why does something need to be fun in order to be consistently useful? Search
is not fun but I do it multiple times a day.

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pohl
I certainly didn't say that it did...I only suggested that some sort of
amusement (at the very least: discussion) might be an important part of
interaction.

But, since we're making rhetorical straw men: what does their desire for users
to interact more have to do with the site being useful?

