LinkedIn innovates: updates and revamps

You know the saying: ‘the friend of my friend is my friend’. Well, if you consider that your employee is your friend – and they should, because after all you trust them enough to give them the opportunity to work with you – it means that your employee’s circle may also represent potential friends/hires. This may sound a bit far-fetched, except it’s not: according to LinkedIn’s official blog, 80% of recruiters say the best channel to recruit quality candidates is employee referrals.

Employee referrals often represent both a time and money-saving option for recruiters who tend to trust these types of candidates more while such applicants end up staying longer within the employer companies. Yet only 18% of recruiters are satisfied with the level of employee engagement their referral program receives. Traditional referral programs rely exclusively on employees, which often fails to be effective. Employees are likely – and rightly so – to get discouraged by a time-consuming endeavor and obscure software.

Based on these observations, LinkedIn introduced last week their brand new referral product. With LinkedIn Referrals, your employees’ first-degree connections who match your open jobs are automatically identified on LinkedIn. While employees can go to the company’s dedicated LinkedIn Referrals website to see their connections who are matches, they will also receive a summary of their matches every other week on their work email address. Then they will be able to send their connections open jobs they’re a match for. Recruiters only get referrals who are applying for the open jobs which ensures that the candidates are both interested and recommended. Currently in an initial launch phase, LinkedIn Referrals is available to companies on supported Applicant Tracking Systems.

But wait, this is not the only news LinkedIn has been releasing lately. Along with the launch of Referrals, Recruiter has been updated, a new LinkedIn Groups experience and iOS app has been released and a brand new mobile flagship app called Voyager has been unveiled – yes, we’re dizzy too.

Such successive news come shortly after the announcement of LinkedIn’s new messaging experience. It seems that LinkedIn teams have been busy working on updates, revamps and innovations lately, and then busy announcing them. But it looks like #1 professional social network is trying to get closer to the user friendly experience of #1 social network.

Now we may wonder what else LinkedIn holds for us?