Tech products are constantly innovating and evolving. Social Media Companies like Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn are striving to develop capabilities and offerings that best appeal to consumers in terms of recruiting, business tools, advertising, and many other subsets. For a very long time, LinkedIn was criticized for being slow in term innovating its product offerings. However, with Microsoft’s acquisition of the latter in June 2016, we believed innovations would be set in place.
Following the acquisition, we have seen LinkedIn improve dramatically in terms of its offerings, a new interface (mixed reviews from consumers) and several other tweaks have resulted in a more complete tech product.
On 12 February 2019, LinkedIn announced that it would be three of its core operations on a single platform- LinkedIn Jobs, Recruiter, and Pipeline Builder.
LinkedIn says that by moving these three on to a single platform, recruiters would find the experience of prospecting to be something so seamless and easy, that LinkedIn is sure has not been experienced yet in the industry.
Dubbed the New Intelligent Hiring Experience, the principal hiring apparatuses of LinkedIn- LinkedIn Recruiter, LinkedIn Jobs, and Pipeline Builder is something that the Microsoft owned company is betting big on.
Aimed and targeted at addressing the hiring needs of companies, LinkedIn says that they had gradually developed the platform, by taking significant inputs from the industry. The new platform will give unlimited access to recruiters to find prospects all assets strategically at one platform, making the entire process streamlined, efficient and productive.
As most Silicon Valley giants are moving towards an era of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (yes, they are subtly different), so also LinkedIn’s new innovation seeks to learn on the go, and adjust to specificities of the recruiter and the results that are being filtered.
John Jersin, who is the Vice President of Product for LinkedIn Talent Solutions and Careers, stated that the tool would “keep learning continuously….giving recruiters even more accurate recommendations.”
The collaborative platform that is aimed to give recruiters a new seamless hiring experience is scheduled to be launched in the late summer of 2019 (insiders say that it might be sometime in June/July).
What are we looking at in terms of product enhancements? LinkedIn says that consumers can expect over fifteen new features and product enhancements on the New Intelligent Hiring Experience platform. We made a list of some of the important enhancements-
Recommended candidates:
Machine Learning on the new product will enable it to learn the specifics as to what recruiters might be looking for, and provide suggestions to the recruiters by automatically surfacing relevant candidates.
LinkedIn says that the tools are capable of learning all the time, and they will keep improving to the point that they become your third arm.
Shared In Mails:
One of the most complicated problems that Recruiters face is maintaining coordination with other members of the recruiting team. This often leads to problems and confusions especially when there are multiple recruitments going on. With the Shared InMails enhancement, Recruiters can access communication history and keep notes as and when they go forward.
Team members on the recruitment team can tag each other if they want to highlight something with a simple @, thereby keeping the team updated. The process will eliminate complexities, and make the recruitment process a seamless one.
Closing the circle:
Recruiters often get thousands of applications on a single position. Yes, they contact and filter the ones that they feel appropriate, but they are unable to communicate the rejection to the vast majority.
LinkedIn has introduced a bulk reject either mailing system that will send out emails, individually, or informing the entire list of people that they have not been selected for the said position through bulk mails. This gives clarity to applicants, as well as helps recruiters maintain ethics.
Slide-in Profile:
Recruiters often have to open several tabs while screening candidates making the entire user experience a cumbersome one. LinkedIn seeks to address that issue with its new Slide in Profile feature.
This enhancement makes it comfortable to review profiles of prospects without feeling the need to retrieve or opening new tabs. Apart from this, recruiters and team members can also add notes to help them.
In this section, we point out some shortcomings and actionable areas that LinkedIn could work on in terms of improving the new platform. So the question then is whether LinkedIn’s new Platform a really big deal? Yes and No- We say yes because we feel that the product enhancements, along with the machine learning and AI features will definitely help recruiters.
It will definitely streamline the process, and make searching for prospects easier. We say no because LinkedIn could have very well used this to also address people at the other end of the spectrum- the job seekers, or applicants. We need to keep in mind that this platform serves two, and LinkedIn should definitely have served something to the applicants.
As a tech product, Microsoft’s 26 Billion Dollar acquisition of LinkedIn highlighted the possibilities and potential of LinkedIn. With the new team at LinkedIn innovating away on such developments, we feel that LinkedIn is again trying to reach to a pedestal and position that it once enjoyed.
We also need to keep in mind that it was during the ‘lag-phase’ of LinkedIn when employment sites like Indeed.com, TimesJobs, Naukri, and others started really increasing their market value and subscription bases. There is no doubt that Satya Nadella and his team at Microsoft have grand plans for LinkedIn.
We are also quite certain that Microsoft would be handling this behemoth in a very different way than it handled a certain Finnish phone maker. We are not going to take any names!
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Part-time blogger, full-time dreamer! Ejaz Ahmed likes to think about how technology will ultimately transform human lives for the better. He is deeply fascinated with using technology to democratize the spread of useful information on the internet.
