Analysis: LinkedIn Is Becoming More and More Important to Recruiters

Authored by Robin Goad on January 28, 2008 - 6:48am.

LinkedIn is part social network, part jobs site. Facebook is the fifth largest site in its upstream clickstream, and last year Sandra wrote about the connections between the two websites. However, LinkedIn has a different user profile to your average social network. It over represents with two key Mosaic lifestyle groups: Group A – Symbols of Success (people with rewarding careers who live in sought after locations, affording luxuries and premium quality products) and Group E – Urban Intelligence (young, single and mostly well-educated, these people are cosmopolitan in tastes and liberal in attitudes).

Both groups contain the sort of people that are in demand, both as consumers and employees. So it’s interesting to see how LinkedIn’s user profile swings against the average for both our Social Networking and Forums and Employment and Training categories in the charts below.

LinkedIn is therefore both an up-market social network and an up-market job site - last week 3.2% of its downstream traffic went to Employment and Training sites. The site is becoming more and more important to the recruitment industry: it still doesn’t send a huge amount of traffic their way, but the traffic that it does send is high quality and, as the chart below illustrates, on the increase.

Robin Goad

Robin Goad is Research Director, Hitwise UK. This piece was originally published on Hitwise analyst blog here.

Published in DMW Daily, January 28, 2008

Previous story: Analysis: WSJ.com Bets On The Value Of Its Niche Audience
Next story: Digital Media Week in Review: Feds Drop Rate; Yahoo Undervalued? Still Bullish on Apple?

Email this page

add to:

del.icio.us |

digg | Yahoo! MyWeb | Slashdot

Comments

Interesting dynamic for identifying leaders earlier...

Submitted by Jeff Carr (not verified) on January 29, 2008 - 8:32am.

I have seen a few questions posted to my LinkedIn network over the years regarding it efficacy as a tool for recruiting. In many cases, those who use LinkedIn on a regular basis are keeping their profiles more up-to-date than resumes. This is interesting because it allows someone to keep their bio online and available without appearing to be "trolling" - a practice shunned upon by recruiters and hiring managers - for example, by having a resume live on Monster or Netshare. The real difference here is the ability to evaluate "who knows who". It is much easier to get a feel for the type of person you are looking to recruit or engage by the type of people they interact with. If I have CEOs and CFOs in my contact list, I appear more qualified as an executive than say someone with "project managers" and CPAs. This makes proactive networking more important than ever.