Every second, more than two more people join LinkedIn’s network of 238 million members.
They are head hunters in search of talent. They are the talent in search of a job. And sometimes, the career site for the professional class is just a hangout for the well-connected worker. Dan Shapero, LinkedIn’s vice president of talent solutions and insights, says the firm can help its corporate clients understand how they’re stacking up against rivals when it comes to attracting and retaining talent.
Dan Shapero, LinkedIn’s vice president of talent solutions and insights, says the firm can help its corporate clients understand how they’re stacking up against rivals when it comes to attracting and retaining talent.
LinkedIn, using complex, carefully concocted algorithms, analyses their profiles and site behaviour to steer them to opportunity. And corporations parse that data to set business strategy. As the network grows moment by moment, LinkedIn’s rich trove of information also grows more detailed and more comprehensive.
It’s big data meeting human resources. And that data, core to LinkedIn’s potential, could catapult the company beyond building careers and into the realms of education, urban development and economic policy.
Chief executive Jeff Weiner put it this way in a recent blog post: “Our ultimate dream is to develop the world’s first economic graph,” a sort of digital map of skills, workers and jobs across the global economy.
Ambitions, in other words, that are a far cry from the industry’s early stabs at modernising the old-fashioned jobs board.
