LinkedIn’s new “Apply with LinkedIn” button began appearing alongside job postings on a thousand different company websites on Monday, including Netflix and LivingSocial, allowing candidates to submit their LinkedIn profile in lieu of a resume or application form.
The product announcement comes the week before LinkedIn will release its first quarterly revenue statement, following its massive IPO in May, and must respond to investors looking for regular returns.
Deep Nishar, LinkedIn’s senior vice president of products, said that although the new feature is free of charge to applicants and employers, it is part of the company’s overall growth and product strategy.
“‘Apply with LinkedIn’ allows LinkedIn to power the professional web,” he said, “and allows members to take advantage of the network effects.”
The plug-in is a logical addition to LinkedIn’s recruitment tools, which currently bring in 43 per cent of the company’s revenues, and have been noted by analysts as the most promising area for growth. Since the enormous success of Facebook’s ‘Like’ button, launched just over a year ago, similar plug-ins have proliferated across the web as companies attempt to expand their reach and drive more traffic from outside their own sites.
With one click, LinkedIn members can share their public profile with a potential employer, then see a list of people in their network who work at the company that they could ask for a recommendation.
For companies, “it really gives them a 360 degree view of the candidate,” Mr Nishar said. They can see how candidates interact on various public forums, how they answer questions, what kinds of articles they share, and how they behave in a professional online environment in general.
“A lot of difficulty in hiring has been in reviewing applications and finding the right candidates to interview from the larger pool,” said Andrew Weinstein, spokesperson for LivingSocial, which currently has 700 job openings worldwide, the majority in sales. The company is integrating applicants’ LinkedIn data into its existing Jobvite recruitment tracking software.
“This makes it easier on the receiving end to automate the review process,” he said.
At some companies, the LinkedIn profile can be connected into Chatter, a company’s internal professional social network, surfacing even more personal connections between applicants and current employees.
This quasi-viral sharing of a job application holds candidates to an even higher level of accountability, said Ted Elliott, chief executive of Jobscience, which has integrated LinkedIn data provided through the plug-in into its recruitment filtering and tracking systems.
“There’s a new burden on the individual to take responsibility for their own data,” he said.
But the network effects work the other way around, too, he said, especially amidst the talent war in Silicon Valley where competition for top engineers and designers is fierce. Competitive candidates can see who they know at various companies and contact them for unbiased views on the corporate culture.
“It makes it even more important to have a good work environment,” Mr Elliott said.
