LinkedIn is rolling out new tools aimed at helping job seekers find new work and recruiters hunt down better matches for open positions.
The professional and career-minded social network, now owned by Microsoft, announced that its Today’s Job Matches feature, which offers members a list of job openings that match their skill sets, will soon be available on the service’s mobile apps. According to LinkedIn, more than half of its members use mobile devices to explore the job market.
Apart from skills, Today’s Job Matches feature takes into account several factors, including a user’s personal preferences, location and salary requirements. In another example of Microsoft push to incorporate artificial intelligence (AI) into its expansive product portfolio, the feature uses machine learning technologies to parse user feedback about job matches and fine-tune suggestions over time.
According to the latest tally from Microsoft, LinkedIn has a half-billion active members. Each week, an estimated 20 million users view jobs on the network, twice the number from two years ago. Approximately 10 million jobs are awaiting hires on LinkedIn.
In terms of making professional connections and exploring career opportunities, LinkedIn is in a league of its own, according to Aatif Awan, vice president of Growth and International Products at LinkedIn.
Each connection represents “an average of 400 new people you can get introduced to and begin to build relationships with,” wrote Awan in a recent blog post. Additionally, each connection can yield 100 new companies seeking talent and create links to more than 500 open positions.
“The impact of half a billion professionals connecting and communicating is very real, and very accessible to anyone who wants to take part today,” Awan added. “We’re excited to think about the potential of what a highly connected global community of professionals can do, and the value that is created for every member of the global workforce.”
Also new is the InMail Analytics Report feature intended to help recruiters attract the right talent.
InMail Analytics Report delivers hourly updates to the dashboard, offering insights on improving performance and how to troubleshoot underperforming areas. The report also displays response rates for different schools, companies and seniority levels, cluing users into whether potential candidates may be open to new opportunities.
“Now recruiters and hiring managers can easily access crystal clear data to see what’s working and what’s not,” wrote Peter Rigano, product manager at LinkedIn, in a separate blog post. “Recruiters can come back with hard numbers—’look, these three schools are responding twice as much as the others’—and get managers to understand where things stand at a glance.”
The solution also provides benchmark data that recruiters can use to see how their performance stacks up to the rest of the industry. To help recruiters better focus their efforts in attracting new talent, the feature also measures the performance of each InMail template to gauge which ones resonate the best with each type of role.
InMail Analytics is available now as part of LinkedIn’s Recruiter tool.