“Shares have fallen more than 40 per cent since Steven Sordello, the company’s chief financial officer, warned about slowing growth at the so-called “talent solutions business”, which sells subscriptions to companies hunting for potential hires.” – quotes an article on the Financial Times about LinkedIn in the recent past.
Here’s my brief take on it as a user. Being a platform business model, a.k.a a multi-sided business model I would expect LinkedIn to keep the mass of individual end users excited about using LinkedIn. But, in several experiences I have felt LinkedIn lacking in it offerings.
- A few days of extensive usage to the advanced search functionality, subsequently blocked me from searching more. I had apparently reached ‘commercial limit for search’ (A problem well articulated here).
- All this when I was looking for the next career opportunity. Yet getting a job-seeker account upgrade did not help. It had to be a still higher premium account. I always considered the reach towards second and third degree contacts as a key proposition.
- InMails go un-responded very often. The ability to send out a certain InMails is interesting. But only if I have any ways of seeing if the other user responds. The least it can do is tell me if the other user read it. Getting in-mail credits refunded is not exactly the reason why I opt for a premium account.
- Inviting Group members: This was a cool feature to connect with members having similar interests. A quick two lines to introduce yourself and describe the intent to connect comes handy when reaching out to people out of your network, but within same groups. That is something I sorely miss.
Does LinkedIn itself use its Talent Solution for hiring?
And lastly, the article in FT states “The company is confident that Talent Solutions will succeed”. I wonder why LinkedIn itself uses JobVite to sources CVs from potential candidates. Do they use their own talent solution in the backend? I can’t say for sure. But while sourcing CVs from potential employees, they definitely do not.
Why does LinkedIn use JobVite? What about its own Talent Solution?
Click here to read the elaborate article on the Financial Times.