Jul 03 2008
How would you describe LinkedIn to a friend or family member?
That’s exactly the question LinkedIn themselves wanted to answer, so they worked with the folks at CommonCraft to make a video explaining LinkedIn.
Jun 21 2008
My LinkedIn profile is available at http://www.linkedin.com/in/sethyates.
Additionally, I manage two alumni groups:
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Jun 16 2008
LinkedIn has critical mass in Australia; job boards fans
Over the past few months, LinkedIn as a professional networking and recruiting tool has really come into its own in Australia. These days, it is somewhat difficult to find an executive (not counting the very top strata of the ‘C’ level) or recruiter who isn’t using it. My LinkedIn “Network Updates” feed runneth over.
Five years ago, when I first joined LinkedIn, I saw the huge potential of the site and thought it would be a success—if they managed to not screw it up and could monetise it properly. Now, with a still loyal and growing user base and US$100m revenues in 2008, it looks like they have done just that and will be the first social network to IPO sometime early 2009.
With absolutely no marketing in Australia, LinkedIn has built almost half a million users in Australia as Jorge has pointed out. I believe LinkedIn has caught the major job boards asleep (or at least complacent) and now poses a clear and present danger to Seek Executive and TheBigChair/MyCareer. While most of the top executive jobs have traditionally been filled via networks and search (and this is clearly where LinkedIn plays), I believe this will increasingly become the case for other senior professional/executive roles. Although LinkedIn won’t eat the job boards’ lunches, it definitely has the potential to constrain their growth in this lucrative segment.
But it looks like the job boards, rather than taking an adversarial stance, are embracing LinkedIn. MyCareer are hiring, and they’re using LinkedIn to do so. I just received this in my LinkedIn Inbox today:
If you have a moment, I’d appreciate your help. Please take a look and forward this job on to anyone you think would be interested in the position, or anyone else who could help me find a great candidate.
Thanks for your help!
-MCompany: MyCareer
Job Title: Business Development Manager
Description: Mycareer.com.au is one of Australia’s leading job sites and part of Fairfax Digital, Australia’s leading provider of News, Finance and Classifieds on the Internet and is a subsidiary of Fairfax Media Limited, publisher of The Age and Sydney Morning Herald.Enjoying unprecedented growth, as a consequence of new product innovation and demand for online advertising solutions, mycareer.com.au is currently searching for a person to sell recruitment advertising packages.The successful candidate will be responsible for engaging, managing and developing their client base.
To meet the challenges of this role, you will ideally be tertiary qualified in a business related discipline and possess a sound working knowledge and understanding of the Internet and online business models. This is an exciting role for a tenacious and switched-on business developer who has previous direct sales experience. Additional experience in the Recruitment or Online industries will be well regarded.
If you are a self-driven professional who enjoys working in a progressive environment, interested applicants please apply online quoting the reference number.
Oh and if you’re interested in applying, here’s the link.
So, the question is: if you’re a job board, what do you do about LinkedIn? Do you embrace and surround, integrate like SimplyHired? Do you fight? Will LinkedIn actually grow the market instead of taking market share? Or do you not see them as a threat?
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Mar 21 2008
LinkedIn Company Profiles
As covered by TechCrunch, LinkedIn has added a Company Profiles feature. This feature shows detailed information about companies, including data from Capital IQ, Business Week as well as information discovered from its own database.
Information includes:
- Summary description
- Employees
- New hires
- Recent promotions and changes
- Popular profiles
- Related companies (career path before and after)
- Top locations
- Common job titles
- Top schools
- Median age
- Median tenure
- Gender
Its pretty impressive what they’ve been able to pull together from their database. Here’s a sampling on interesting info from the Fairfax Digital company profile page:
Fairfax Digital is an online publisher that focuses on areas including news and classifieds
and city search directories[ed. not since 2002 when we sold CitySearch]. The company operates Internet portals such as the Sydney Morning Herald, The Age,The Australian Financial Review[ed. operated by Fairfax Business Media], mycareer.com.au, drive.com.au and domain.com.au. Fairfax Digital was formerly known as F2 Network. The company is based in Sydney, Australia…. see more Fairfax Digital operates as a subsidiary ofJohn Fairfax Holdings[ed. now called Fairfax Media].
Mostly right, but looks to be based on information that several years old.
Popular Profiles
- Ed Schmidt, Director of Operations - Southern Cross View
- Seth Yates, Chief Technology Officer
- Jack Matthews, CEO
- Nikhil Jain, Online Marketing Manager - RSVP
- pippa leary, Product and Marketing Director
Related Companies
Divisions
- Fairfax Media
- The Age
OK, so they got that wrong, Fairfax Media (the parent company) and The Age (a sister subsidiary) aren’t divisions of Fairfax Digital. Sure we can get it fixed up.
Here’s where it gets interesting:
Career path for Fairfax Digital employees before:
- News Corporation
- Sensis
- IBM
- Telstra
- ninemsn
Career path for Fairfax Digital employees after:
- News Corporation
- ninemsn
- BBC Worldwide
- Optus
So there’s a lot of two-way traffic between Fairfax and News Corp and ninemsn. But it looks like once you’ve left Telstra/Sensis, there’s no going back.
Fairfax Digital employees are most connected to
- Myca
- News Corporation
- realestate.com.au
- Sensis MediaSmart
Looks like LinkedIn has misinterpreted “MyCareer” / mycareer.com.au (one of our business units) as Myca, which is a startup hedge fund in New York. Again, probably easily fixed.
Key Statistics
Top Locations
- Sydney Area, Australia (300)
- Melbourne Area, Australia (62)
Industry: Online Media
Type: Public Company
Status: Operating Subsidiary
Company Size: 1001-5000 employees [ed., that's the size of Fairfax Media]
Website: www.fairfaxdigital.com.auMedian Age: 30 years
Median Tenure: 2 years
Male: 58%
Female: 42%Common Job Titles
Business Development Manager 7%
Web Developer 6%
Account Manager 6%
Journalist 4%
Developer 3%
Top Schools
Univ. of New South Wales 10%
Univ. of Sydney 10%
Univ. of Tech., Sydney 9%
Queensland Univ. of Tech. 4%
Royal Melbourne Inst. of Tech. 4%
Its interesting to have a look through the company profiles of companies in the industry and see the similarities and differences (e.g., most other media companies I browsed was 62% Male / 38% Female according to LinkedIn). Although they have some work to do on getting the data more accurate (and they are apparently going to “wikify” the profiles to let employees edit the data), this is a great start.
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Mar 17 2008
LinkedIn Mobile UI improvements needed
I recently tweeted:
sethyates linkedin UI sucks on a mobile - both mobile ui and web ui
Steve Ganz (from LinkedIn) promptly replied:
steveganz @sethyates, what can we do to make it better?
BTW - looks like the timestamps in Twitter are local to the sending user (I’m in Australia, he’s in California), hence why he replied to me before I tweeted 
Well, a proper response wouldn’t fit into a 140 character tweet, so here goes in a blog post:
First, I use LinkedIn quite often and would love to use it on my BlackBerry Pearl when on the road/away from the laptop, but the UI when rendered on a mobile (either using www.linkedin.com or m.linkedin.com) just doesn’t do it for me. These improvements would help me and fit my use case, maybe they wouldn’t fit the majority cases. Disclaimer over, here’s my list:
mobile UI (m.linkedin.com)
- The home page (after logging in) is simply a Search box. Now, the time I spend searching in LinkedIn is rather limited so this isn’t really an appropriate home screen. Here’s what I want to see here: let me set my status (”What are you working on?”, contacts’ status updates and inbox/action items (Invitations, Accepted Invitations, Recommendation requests, In Mail, etc). It’d also be nice to know some of the connection stats from the www home page (# connections, network size, new people in network since X date, # views of profile, etc).
- I manage a group that gets several new member requests a day. There’s no way to manage the group using this UI.
- The contacts page only has next/previous, and starts on A-C surnames. If I want to get the contact details of a Contact with a surname starting with M-O, I’m many clicks away. Add a quicker way for me to get to another page. Move the Search box from the home page here.
- Once I’ve found a contact, you don’t display their contact details like you do on the www UI. Sometimes I just want to grab their email address (yes I know you have “Send a Message”, but often I want to contact them from my email account directly).
- On the contact’s profile, perhaps start out showing an abbreviated experience listing (e.g., don’t show details - I often don’t need to see that and am happy to click again if I want to see the experience details).
Web UI on the mobile (www.linkedin.com)
- Only one comment really: its just a jumble. This is a result of the BB not rendering the stylesheet. To see what it looks like in your browser, run up Firefox with the Web Developer toolbar and disable CSS. Luckily there’s “Skip to content” near the top, because the top several pages is just the menu in list format.
With these tweaks in place, I reckon the LinkedIn Mobile UI would be the ducks nuts.
Related posts
Feb 28 2008
LinkedIn site update
Just logged into LinkedIn and noticed that they’ve rolled out a site reskin.
The first thing I noticed was that they’ve added a new status feature akin to the Facebook status. Other than that, I’ve not noticed any other significant feature changes so this looks mostly like a freshen-up. First impressions of the freshen-up, though I must say, aren’t favourable. Like all site changes, I’ll probably get used to them, but the old design had a more professional feel to it. The new design has introduced a new navigation structure and look that makes it seem more like Facebook (not a good thing).
