The Blog

Yes­ter­day GigaOM announced that LinkedIn would launch Apply with LinkedIn before the end of the month. The ser­vice appar­ently allows com­pa­nies to put a link next to their jobs which can­di­dates can click on and apply for the job with their LinkedIn profile.

There is no infor­ma­tion yet whether this is a paid for ser­vice, and if so, how much it will cost. In LinkedIn’s recent IPO doc­u­ments it esti­mates the world­wide staffing mar­ket at $85b in 2010. It reck­ons there’s a $27 bil­lion oppor­tu­nity in hir­ing tools, where it clearly sets its sights.

The GigaOm arti­cle says the ser­vice “bun­dles appli­cants’ data to sim­plify the sort­ing process on the employer side”. Pre­sum­ably, there will be a web based login for com­pa­nies to view these fil­tered candidates.

How would you do this? The first thing we’d do (in the inter­est of full dis­clo­sure we’re build­ing Zartis — an online recruit­ment tool) is fil­ter can­di­dates by “dis­tance”. For exam­ple, if a can­di­date has a first degree con­nec­tion to an employee in your com­pany they get pushed to the top. The other areas worth fil­ter­ing would be indus­try, years of expe­ri­ence, loca­tion, cur­rent title/company and a key­word search in Experience.

Clearly, there are prob­lems with the above fil­ters. A fan­tas­tic web devel­oper in Scot­land, work­ing in the insur­ance indus­try for three years might get a poor posi­tion­ing for a role as a devel­oper in Dublin on a HR sys­tem and so on.

The impact of LinkedIn’s hir­ing solu­tions on other online recruit­ment com­pa­nies is going to be very inter­est­ing. LinkedIn owns the pro­files, and inter­nal click­streams, of 100m+ pro­fes­sion­als. But it also exposes an API to let just about any­body extract much of the pro­file infor­ma­tion. Star­tups have been quick to seize on the oppor­tu­nity. Take pophire.com for exam­ple. It allows users to pull their pro­file out of LinkedIn and cross ref­er­ence it against jobs in Indeed.com, a free jobs aggre­ga­tion site. The results are pretty good. How does LinkedIn feel about all this?

There are two sides (at least) to the recruit­ment process: the can­di­date and the job. LinkedIn clearly has the pro­fes­sional can­di­dates. But they charge for com­pa­nies to post the job. Indeed and Career­Jet don’t. So when some­body inter­me­di­ates match­ing LinkedIn’s pro­files and Indeed’s jobs what hap­pens next?

If LinkedIn turns off third party access to pro­files (it’s con­sen­sus based API) it quickly solves the prob­lem above. But in doing so it would cre­ate a data silo and enable new and exist­ing com­peti­tors to go after its entire busi­ness. Like them or not, ser­vices like Bran­chOut are already build­ing mas­sive pro­fes­sional graphs into other social networks.

They’re smart peo­ple at LinkedIn. They know a lot more than any of us look­ing in from the out­side. It would be great to hear more about their API plans and whether they will remain an open sys­tem. If it gets closed off you can bet that face­book, Microsoft and the other usual sus­pects are wait­ing to pounce. They’re all eye­balling LinkedIn’s piece of the pie with envy and ambi­tion. It will also be inter­est­ing to see how the likes of Taleo react to the new developments.

Few peo­ple doubt that the online recruit­ment model is chang­ing pro­foundly. The Linkedin IPO seems almost like old news at this stage. But with all the hoopla many missed out on what hap­pened ear­lier stage com­pa­nies. Jibe, a social job list­ing startup in New York, raised $6m in May. Two days before Job­vite, a SF based social recruit­ing com­pany raised $15m. Five days before that Bran­chOut announced that it raised $18m. That’s almost $40m in fund­ing for the early stage sec­tor in ten days. Small beer com­pared to the big gorilla’s IPO but notable none the less.

The other notable absence of dia­logue is around what’s hap­pen­ing inter­na­tion­ally. LinkedIn has more users out­side of the US than in the US but it’s not (yet?) the biggest pro­fes­sional net­work in all coun­tries. In Ger­many and Aus­tria, it’s Xing. In France, it’s Viadeo. There are a num­ber of incum­bents in India and China. China is an inter­est­ing case because the gov­ern­ment has a nasty habit of shut­ting off access to pop­u­lar social media sites that aren’t home grown. LinkedIn already blood­ied its nose in this regard.

That LinkedIn is going to push an Apply with LinkedIn but­ton to web sites is only a small part of a much big­ger debate. The core issue is how much of the recruit­ment world will be owned by LinkedIn and what are the gaps that the rest of us can focus on.

If you’ve got this far you may as well reg­is­ter now for a free trial of Zartis, our social recruit­ing tool.

Thanks for read­ing — John