Last updated on November 5th, 2015 at 02:35 pm
LinkedIn has announced the roll-out of two new products, Referrals and Voyager, and the revamp of its Recruiter tool during its Talent Connect conference.
Geared toward expanding LinkedIn’s use of data and user activity, these new products offer ways of maximizing the platform for different purposes, from communications to recruitment.
Smarter recruiting with Referrals and Recruiter
With 380 million users, LinkedIn is the single largest portal of professional profiles in the web. As such, it has changed the way companies recruit their workforce.
Referrals is LinkedIn’s newest product set to be available by November 1. It is a site extension built to streamline the referral process where employees can easily recommend first-degree connections for open positions at their employers. According to LinkedIn, Referrals will be available for companies at around $10 per employee per year.
On their Talent blog, LinkedIn’s head of talent Eduardo Vivas said, “I’m thrilled to introduce LinkedIn Referrals – our brand new referrals product that makes it dead simple for employees to make quality referrals, and helps you unlock your employees’ networks to hire the best talent faster.”
LinkedIn revealed in a study that 80 percent of recruiters see referrals as the best way to acquire new talent. These recruiters have seen referrals perform better and stay in-company longer than headhunted or non-referral hires.
Meanwhile, Vivas also announced LinkedIn’s revamping of their Recruiter tool. Designed to help recruiters find talent fit for open positions, the existing Recruiter version needed improvement in finding talent that analyzes on various hiring factors. Vivas said recruiters have the person they want in mind but might not always have the correct search criteria or query to input into LinkedIn to find the right and qualified people to invite.
“LinkedIn Recruiter will automatically build your search string using the job title, skills, company, and industry, listed on the employee’s profile. It will show you the terms it used to build the search string, let you add or remove terms, and instantly update the list of members who meet your search criteria – helping you quickly identify the members who are a match for your open job,” said Vivas.
Recruiter and Referrals are all tools under LinkedIn’s Talent Solutions department, their biggest earner. In their three month data ending in June 30, the reported revenue for Talent Solutions was $443 million, a 38 percent upsurge from the same period a year before. The social network forecasted a full-year revenue of $2.94 billion in a statement in July.
Project Voyager, made for a better and less formal mobile experience
In the Talent Connect conference, LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner presented the new mobile app for LinkedIn called Voyager. It’s a completely different user experience from the desktop web version of the social network. Following a more intuitive and mobile-friendly design, LinkedIn made the leap considering more than 50 percent of its traffic is coming from mobile.
Branding a UI similar to widely popular social networks like Facebook, the Voyager app features Home, Me, Messaging, My Network, and Search.
“What we’re releasing is more modern, light, airy, fresh,” said LinkedIn user experience design director Hemendra Kumar as reported by VentureBeat. It is in-line with LinkedIn’s thrust to be a more “human” platform, moving away from the stiff and dry image of the professional social network.
TechCrunch reports Weiner saying that Voyager could go live in a matter of weeks.
Photo via LinkedIn
