As reported on TechCrunch.
by Ingrid Lunden
LinkedIn says that today 40% of its 300 million users access the site on mobile devices, so its bid to tap into the wave of users accessing the site via smartphones and tablets continues apace: today the company is launching LinkedIn Job Search, an iOS app that will let people search and apply for jobs on the social network. This is LinkedIn’s first standalone app dedicated to these features.
The app is now live in the U.S. iOS App Store, with further versions in more markets coming soon, a spokesperson says.
This new job search app is the next step forward in LinkedIn’s attempts to make looking and applying for jobs more accessible on mobile devices; it follows an update made to LinkedIn’s main app in August 2013, when it added the ability to search and apply for jobs directly within the app.
LinkedIn says the new app add more features than what it had previously rolled into its main app:
– A more detailed way to search for, research, and apply for jobs, including customisations based on job title, location, company, industry, and seniority level.
– Tapping into LinkedIn’s ongoing search algorithm development, it will also offer tailored job recommendations based on saved searches as well as jobs a person has viewed and that person’s own LinkedIn profile.
– More detail on how your own network extends to the prospective company in question, as well as more facts about the company.
– And tapping into both the finite and fleeting nature of job availability, a notifications service so that you can keep up with when new jobs are coming up, or those you’ve flagged are closing their application window in case you’ve forgotten.
LinkedIn Job Search is significant for a couple of reasons.
The first is that it is about LinkedIn trying to play more to its strengths. The company has been very ambitious about ramping up the kind of content it offers on LinkedIn.com, with a wave of moves like adding Pulse for news, opening the platform to members to publish their own content, and generally trying to look and act more like a social network and meeting ground for people to keep returning to the site regularly and think of it as their go-to place for professional information and networking.
But at the end of the day the company’s biggest business today, right now, is in the area of recruitment. Specifically, in the last quarter, made 58% of its revenue, $275.9 million, from the “talent solutions” segment. If you look at the company’s wider range of apps on iOS, half of them (three out of six) are related to LinkedIn’s job search and talent solution efforts. The others are aimed at the recruiters, rather than the jobseekers, and this is about filling that out and tapping into where LinkedIn is already doing well.
The second is a bigger trend around how social networks are building out their app portfolios. Facebook has made a big push into making strategic moves with standalone apps for specific features, be they established services like Messenger or new efforts like Slingshot. The reason: it drives way more traffic which is an important metric for ad-based businesses. With LinkedIn also looking to make revenue in that area, it looks like it too is going for a similar strategy.