LinkedIn, one of the world’s top websites for job recruitment, is making many big changes this year to how it organizes its website.
According to Forbes, LinkedIn is rethinking and retooling its current algorithm to account for the fact that not everyone necessarily wants to leave their company — some people just want a different position in the same company. The internet job-search giant found in a recent survey of job-hoppers that about 42% would have been willing to stay with their previous employer had they been presented with a new job more in line with their interests and skills.
Parker Barrile, a LinkedIn VP for product, says that “People quit their jobs — not their companies… It’s a CEO-level problem.” LinkedIn has been carefully testing a system in which employees of large companies (100+ posted job positions) receive carefully chosen recommendations of other internal openings, based on LinkedIn’s data of where users typically go with their career path.
Although 97% of recruiters use LinkedIn, the first mistake many job seekers make, according to a poll of executive recruiters listed in Social Media Today, is that they “aren’t connected to recruiters.”
“LinkedIn has been a powerful tool for us,” explains Doug O’Grady, Sales Director at SalesForce Search. “It has allowed us to break into new candidate markets in geographies that we previously didn’t have a presence in.”
LinkedIn, which currently serves about 277 million members around the world, is looking for other ways to increase its relevance to users. One of the big changes planned for 2014 is a conversion to mobile, which includes the release of one or two standalone apps. Last Thursday, Barrile announced that 41% of all global traffic for LinkedIn now comes from mobile devices, and the company is expecting to see 50% mobile traffic within the year. The company has been preparing for this moment by continually building the site to be more mobile friendly, including the adoption of a “multi-app” strategy, such as what Facebook uses.