One of Hari Srinivasan’s first projects at LinkedIn was to help design the platform’s profiles. Srinivasan thought about business and trade conferences, where professionals network and exchange ideas and experiences. He imagined the first encounter between two networkers.
“When me and you first meet, what’s the first thing we do? We find something in common. We may shake hands. We understand how to pronounce each others’ names,” he said. “Look at the profile today.”
Then he pointed to the LinkedIn profile. It features a picture of the user, underneath which appears the user’s name and how to pronounce it correctly, if they’re verified, and a short summary of their professional interests, followed by their experiences and skills.
“There’s a lot happening [at] LinkedIn, but that human-to-human connection…was always an insight that stuck with me,” he said.
Srinivasan began working for the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company in 2014. He now oversees its $7 billion talent solutions business as VP of product. As he leads the company's future product development, especially as it contends with the current AI business transformation, one overarching fundamental remains clear, he said. The 23-year-old professional social network is, at its core, a platform for connecting humans .
The Rolodex of business. Silicon Valley investor and entrepreneur Reid Hoffman launched LinkedIn from his living-room with co-founders Allen Blue, Konstantin Guericke, Eric Ly, and Jean-Luc Vaillant. When LinkedIn debuted in May 2003, it emerged as a digital networking tool to help professionals connect and share career updates.
“I went down to LinkedIn when they were pretty small, and there were a whole bunch of companies trying to build [a] profile-based internet system for humans,” said HR industry analyst Josh Bersin, pointing to Friendster as an example. “LinkedIn was one of the only ones focused on authentic humans. You couldn’t put a pseudonym in there. You had to be yourself, and it was the Rolodex of business.”
In the last near quarter century, LinkedIn has evolved into a must-have HR tool, especially in recruiting. Beyond just a professional networking site, it’s become a critical platform helping people connect to new professional opportunities.
“It became this magnet of job seekers or professionals…wanting to be [on] LinkedIn so recruiters could find them,” Bersin said. “Then recruiters wanting to be in LinkedIn, because that’s the place where the real candidates [are]...the people that are actually probably the most powerful candidates are the people who aren't looking.”
Bersin noted the unique relationship LinkedIn has with its members. The network is a community of professionals. Some are active job seekers and others are not.
“The data is owned by the users. We own our own profiles, so the recruiters don’t own the data. If we take our data out, LinkedIn deletes it…That’s the reason people use it, because they trusted it wasn’t just a recruiting database,” he said.
LinkedIn Recruiter. With its massive network of members (the platform boasted a cool 10 million users by 2007), LinkedIn Recruiter launched in 2008. Created in response to feedback from recruiters, according to the company, it aimed to help TA pros search for and reach both passive and active candidates.
Recruiters could proactively build talent pipelines, personalize outreach based on profiles, and narrow searches for the right candidate based on skills, experience, and even location.
“I think that that already makes a big difference,” said Benjamin Friedrich, associate professor of strategy at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Business. “You don’t only get access to a talent pool that applies to you; you get access to a talent pool that’s potentially there that you can reach out to.”
More members flooded the site and so did the dollars. The company raised $154.8 million from Sequoia Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners, and Bain Capital Ventures, among others between 2003 and 2009, according to Crunchbase. It became the first major US social media company to go public in 2011, raising an initial public offering that valued it at $4.3 billion, the largest US tech valuation at the time since Google.
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LinkedIn surpassed 100 million members in 2011, 500 million in 2017, and vaulting to more than 1 billion now. Seven people are hired every minute on LinkedIn, according to the company.
Friedrich also said that LinkedIn is shaping employer branding, calling it a powerful tool to reach potential employees. LinkedIn business pages can impact a company’s employer brand through posts, videos, and company insights. More than 67 million companies are listed on the site.
“The company page on LinkedIn is a product…They got really smart about products that they could sell to—mostly—the recruiting department that would help them recruit online,” Bersin said.
LinkedIn Learning. In 2015, Linkedin acquired online learning platform Lynda.com. That acquisition would grow into LinkedIn Learning a year later, the same year Microsoft acquired the company for $26.2 billion.
“That was a really important decision for us,” Srinivasan said of the Lynda.com acquisition. “It’s not just about our ability to connect job seekers to the hirers...It’s [also] how do we help ensure that we are playing an active role in trying to close the skills gaps, and make sure that the economy is ready for what comes next.”
Srinivasan said LinkedIn is playing a part in nurturing skills-based hiring by helping members understand what skills they can grow in ways that specifically address the job they want or the field they’re looking to enter.
“I’m a strong believer in this idea that we call skills-based hiring, and that people have a series of capabilities, and sometimes they don’t know—and…the labor market doesn’t know—how to best deploy those skills in order for them to get the best opportunity. The hires don't know where those people are, and it’s the most complicated marketplace in the world,” Srinivasan said.
More than 60% of Fortune 100 companies use both LinkedIn Talent Solutions and LinkedIn Learning, according to the company.
An AI-powered future. As AI upends the recruiting and hiring landscape, Srinivasan told HR Brew that the technology is allowing LinkedIn to reimagine how to hire and how to leverage native AI tools to assist in that process. For Srinivasan, the power of AI and the skill-based hiring framework reveal, in part, some of the direction LinkedIn is headed.
“So, you start with that principle [that] my job is to really figure out how we can best deploy skills across the economy and help make the world a better place…you start making a different set of products,” he said.
LinkedIn is testing a completely new job-search tool utilizing its own large language model (LLM) to help users identify roles and opportunities they might not come across otherwise, allowing a user to “put in their mission, their vision, their dream, whatever they want to do, and we create a set of opportunities for them.”
Srinivasan also pointed to AI-powered assistance that can help candidates understand how they stack up for a position; recommend coursework to make them more competitive; and a new coaching feature in LinkedIn Learning that allows learners to practice human skills in interactive scenarios.
Srinivasan told HR Brew the AI-enabled future at LinkedIn will continue to focus on the human-to-human connection. The AI tools he and his team are eyeing address the “tedious day-to-day” so TA pros can spend more time with candidates, assessing if they are the right fit, and ensuring new hires are set up for success.
“I’m pretty excited about where we’re going… AI is going to change the world of hiring, and learning, and job seeking, and I think we’re well into that transition now,” Srinivasan said. “I’m excited for LinkedIn to start taking kind of an active role in how that will be.”
This is one of the stories of our Quarter Century Project, which highlights the various ways industry has changed over the last 25 years. Check back each month for new pieces in this series and explore our timeline featuring the ongoing series.
