LinkedIn: How social networking sites subvert hiring with big data

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Introduction: When it was founded in 2003, LinkedIn was just a professional social platform. But now it is trying to be a "game changer" in the recruiting industry.

When it was founded in 2003, LinkedIn was just a professional social platform. But now it is trying to be a "game changer" in the recruiting industry.

On LinkedIn, individual users can create resumes, receive referral post information, establish contact with friends, and receive inquiries from companies that are interested in them. And the enterprise can publish the job advertisement, search the user's CV and contact, also can create the homepage of the enterprise.

For now, LinkedIn has a membership of 313 million, of which two-thirds lives outside the United States. At the same time, tens of thousands of companies are using LinkedIn to recruit experienced employees. For many HR, having a LinkedIn recruiting account is like a bond trader owning a Bloomberg terminal, which shows that you are an insider.

By bringing a large number of businesses and professionals to a platform, LinkedIn is moving in the direction of the global talent pool. And the ambition of Jeff Venard, the chief executive of LinkedIn, is more than that. He paints a vision for everyone that LinkedIn will build a global economic map based on large data on the platform in the future. This map shows the extent to which talent supply and demand are matched across the globe. "By then, 3.3 billion of the world's workforce will have their own career information to maximize the balance between supply and demand." ”

Social recruitment

Unlike a purely recruiting site, LinkedIn provides users with a personalized, professional social platform to showcase their positions and educational backgrounds, share experience in the workplace, and provide recruitment, marketing and sales services.

LinkedIn's income comes mainly from the latter. Companies need to pay LinkedIn a fee if they want to post a job advertisement on LinkedIn, or collect information and contact them. The business, known as the talent solution, contributes about three-fifths of the revenue to LinkedIn.

In the opinion of LinkedIn's China chief, Shenboyang, one of the big advantages of LinkedIn compared to rivals is that companies can search for a large number of "passive" job seekers through it. Usually, the recruitment site can only serve 10% of the users, that is, those who are actively looking for a job, 90% of the people are satisfied with the status of the current work, there are better job opportunities may also consider job-hopping. LinkedIn is mainly for the 90% of the "passive Job seekers" service, so with the traditional recruitment site "is not a magnitude."

On LinkedIn, users ' resumes are long standing and regularly updated, and companies and headhunters can easily search for them. LinkedIn also allows companies to conduct classified searches, such as searching for job seekers who have a learning experience in a particular university. Typically, companies have locked up some potential candidates on LinkedIn before starting a recruitment campaign. For these employers, the LinkedIn platform is like a talent database that can be found and invoked at any time.

According to Shenboyang, there are three types of companies that advertise on LinkedIn's China website, one that typically has overseas expansion needs, such as Baidu, Huawei and Lenovo. When they set up branches overseas, the most cost-effective way is not to find a local headhunter, or send their HR overseas to recruit, but to find the right person through LinkedIn.

The second type of company is the need to recruit overseas talent back to China's local enterprises. For example, Alibaba, Baidu and other companies from overseas to recruit a large number of talent, they found, if through an effective platform, from overseas "batch" to the well-educated, with foreign work experience, especially the Chinese recruit to work in China, the effect will be very good. As a result, companies with "returnee" recruitment needs are also very important customers for LinkedIn. The third group is the branch of multinational companies in China.

It is reported that LinkedIn in the domestic customers in addition to some well-known IT companies, there are traditional car companies, pharmaceutical companies. LinkedIn, which officially entered the Chinese market in February this year, currently has only about 10 sales staff in the country, and the company has not yet started to promote it on a large scale. But Shenboyang revealed that LinkedIn's revenue in the Chinese market has been a level of recruiting sites that have made several rounds of fundraising in the country, compared to "the size of thousands of other companies." ”

Make recruiting more and more "smart"

For now, LinkedIn is attracting users from all walks of life around the world and has more and more data. The number of jobs on LinkedIn has soared from 350,000 to about 1 million since the beginning of June this year.

On this basis, LinkedIn is trying to make recruiting solutions more "intelligent" in the context of data. Shenboyang For example, if a company is looking for a marketing director, the traditional approach is to select the best candidate from among the many applicants, but LinkedIn will allow businesses to broaden their search to find people who are temporarily not looking for a job. In addition, if the company's demand for the market director is high, he hopes that the candidate's career starting point is the top 500, preferably in companies such as the brand manager, and then in some large internet companies as marketing director, then through the LinkedIn platform, these conditions can be searched.

In addition to the candidate's professional skills and employment experience, he has a good friend relationship, and the industry elite interaction, the future is likely to become a business recruitment considerations. These conditions can be added to LinkedIn's search terms via algorithms. Employers may even be able to do a background check on LinkedIn--if the company happens to know the candidate's best friend. HR can ask that friend about a candidate's past job performance, which is a job that the traditional recruiting website can't do.

"In my opinion, these manual searches are relatively rudimentary," he said. The future, big data to become more powerful, more intelligent, should be the initiative to recommend suitable candidates. "Companies are using tools to tell LinkedIn what to look for and the LinkedIn system will automatically recommend that person to you," Shenboyang said. The precise match between the two is large data. ”

In addition to recruiting externally, LinkedIn can also help companies find their own in-house talent. A French telecoms company, for example, is trying to combine LinkedIn's data with the company's internal data to find aspiring talent within the company.

In addition, companies can track how many of their employees have joined rival companies through the LinkedIn platform and how many of their own employees come from rival companies. Based on this data, companies can assess their attractiveness in the industry. For users, they are able to use the "Follow" feature to focus on companies they do not join. This, in part, has become an indicator of the potential interest in looking for a job. Several tech giants in the United States are known to have many followers on LinkedIn.

Economic map

In addition to providing services for corporate recruiters and job seekers, LinkedIn is trying to make a difference in more areas. For example, through the analysis of large data, LinkedIn can clarify the flow of talent between China and the United States.

"We can tell from the analysis, five years ago more Chinese people to go to the United States, what they learn most what kind of professional; now the trend is the return of talent, so the students are more undergraduate or master degree, which major students will choose to return." After returning home, what kind of profession is more popular. What is the difference between local and foreign firms ' skills needs for talent? "Shenboyang told the 21st century economic reporter," We dig out these data, we can give the community and individuals a certain direction, tell us five years later, China's most needed professional skills. Some universities can also offer courses based on these data. ”

At present, many college students have not yet graduated from LinkedIn to learn about the employment of Elder sisters, and for their future career planning to provide a reference.

Some companies in the forefront are also starting to use LinkedIn to help them make business decisions. For example, by reading job seekers ' information, they can find out which areas have more potential employees and decide where to set up new offices or factories. In other words, what LinkedIn wants to change is not just the way it hires and jobs, but the efficiency of the entire labour market.

In the ideal state of Jeff Venard, the chief executive of LinkedIn, LinkedIn can map out a grand "economic map" based on the data. In particular, if LinkedIn can track the relationship between job seekers, companies and universities and map out the matching maps of jobs, qualifications and skills with employers ' requirements, it can progressively improve the flow of information in the labour market and create large data on the labour market.

These data are intertwined in a way that eliminates the mismatch between talent skills and job requirements, and mismatch between workplace and place of residence. Large data can drive the right human resources to move to countries or regions in need and ultimately improve the efficiency of the global economy.

This is the vision of LinkedIn for the next ten years. LinkedIn hopes that, with its help, the global labour market will run more smoothly. Even so, Shenboyang is not denying the company's big data challenges. In his words, access to data has become increasingly easy, and the advent of various mobile devices has made the volume of data more and more large. But most companies, including LinkedIn, are still not keeping up with the huge amount of data, how to better process the data and turn it into business insights. In other words, LinkedIn still has a long way to go in the precise analysis and application of large data.

Even with all the difficulties, LinkedIn has drawn more and more researchers ' interest. Researchers at Harvard Business School, studying LinkedIn's data, found that graduate employment in a recession is no worse than that of a graduate in a prosperous economy. While ancillary academic research is not what LinkedIn currently considers, the social platform appears to have become popular in every field, on the side.

(Original title: LinkedIn: Subversion of recruitment with large data)