2011 was undoubtedly LinkedIn’s biggest year to date: we crossed the 100 million member mark, started trading on the New York Stock Exchange and welcomed President Obama for a town hall on jobs and the economy. We also spent plenty of time thinking about how we can make Talent Acquisition professionals more productive and successful in their roles, and how we can work with them to revolutionize the recruiting industry.
Before we jump feet-first into the year that’s upon us, let’s take a look back at the biggest milestones of last year. Here are the top ten ways that LinkedIn made you a better recruiter in 2011.
10. We launched LinkedIn.com in seven new languages (including Russian, Turkish, Japanese and Korean) and opened offices in areas where LinkedIn is growing fastest—such as Brazil, India and France. These days, everyone is thinking globally—and as our global focus grows, so do your global talent pools.
9. LTBD (“little things, big difference”) upgrades in LinkedIn Recruiter—such as a redesigned navigation and the ability to browse and filter the networks of your own first-degree connections, automating Lou Adler’s cherry-picking technique—make you more productive in your day-to-day sourcing.
8. Company Status Updates let you communicate directly with your company’s followers on LinkedIn in their network update stream, giving you a new way to build relationships and consistently stay top-of-mind with candidates. How will you use it?
7. Have you ever seen a LinkedIn profile and thought ‘I’d like more just like this one,’ or do you have a superstar employee that you wish you could just clone? Similar Profiles in LinkedIn Recruiter lets you do just that—using an algorithm to source profiles similar to that of any individual on LinkedIn—and helping you find quality candidates you wouldn’t have found before.
6. Also new in LinkedIn Recruiter: the Hiring Manager feature alleviates friction in the sourcing process, letting you effortlessly share interesting profiles with your hiring managers and get quick feedback from them.
5. Most passive candidates don’t have an up-to-date resume, so even if they see a job that interests them, they likely won’t apply. Apply with LinkedIn changes all that by letting professionals apply for jobs simply using their LinkedIn profile—helping you attract active and even passive candidates to your jobs.
4. Employee referrals are most companies’ largest and highest-quality source of hire. Referral Engine revolutionizes referral hiring, making it easier than ever for your employees to participate in employee referral programs by suggesting quality referral candidates from their networks using our matching algorithms.
3. A slew of jobs improvements make your jobs more targeted to relevant candidates and increase jobs’ virality and reach: through automatic personalized job recommendations to job viewers via email, one-click sharing of jobs to social networks, Groups, and individuals from Recruiter, and the addition of “Jobs You May Be Interested In” to the LinkedIn homepage network update stream.
2. LinkedIn crossed the 100 million member mark in March, and there are now more than 135 million members on the site—with professionals joining at a rate faster than two new members per second. What does this mean for you? An ever-growing pool of passive candidates waiting (and willing!) to hear from you.
1. At Talent Connect Las Vegas, to a cheering crowd of more than 1,800 professionals in Talent Acquisition (and thousands more watching via live stream), our CEO Jeff Weiner announced Talent Pipeline. Most of our customers tell us that they track talent leads with out-of-date spreadsheets or other disorganized, ad hoc methods—but Talent Pipeline will give you a single place to grow, track, and stay connected with all of your talent leads, whether you sourced them on LinkedIn or not.
Rest assured that we have plenty more up our sleeves in 2012, and you’ll be the first to hear about it here on the Recruiting with LinkedIn blog.
