LinkedIn announces new product, shifts focus to recruiters

LinkedIn are on a fast track to monetisation recently, as a modest (to disappointing) performance on the stock market has exposed the social network’s ability to turn its users into cash for investors. Now they’re back with yet another new product, focusing this time at the lucrative recruitment market.

They’re calling it Talent Pipeline and it was unveiled by CEO Jeff Weiner at a conference in Las Vegas on Tuesday. It functions as a centralised place for recruiters to manage all the leads they gather through LinkedIn, to make for more streamlined lead generation and follow-up.

Jeff Weiner commented on the announcement by saying: “”Recruiters are actively looking for more talent from more sources and managing all their talent leads across multiple tools. With LinkedIn Talent Pipeline, we’re extending our Recruiter platform and continuing our focus to connect talent with opportunity on a massive scale by providing a single place to manage and update these leads, wherever they are found.”

The recruiter’s network?

What this latest move by LinkedIn shows is that they are moving more into being a network for recruiters, as opposed to a pure-play social network for business types. This focus is by no means new for LinkedIn, as they have always had a focus on recruitment, but they seem to be focusing on this area more and more. Perhaps this is because their potential as a social network in the more traditional sense is exposed or at least, exposed in terms of the limited ability to monetise the site. Now that they’re on the stock market they have do do things differently. Every move they make and product they develop has to be able to clearly show a direct route to monetisation and what they seem to be discovering, perhaps unsurprisingly, is that the money is in recruitment as opposed to social networking.

LinkedIn have clearly been practising their new approach for a few months now. With notable changes to their ad and premium products on the site, it shows that this is the approach they need to take. Despite a shaky start when entering the stock market, this is beginning to change. Their stock has risen from $70.75 per share on October 4th, to close at $90.31 on October 14th.

This could suggest that their new strategy is beginning to kick in, as they become all about chasing the revenue and less on the social features on the site that foster real, valuable business connections. What remains to be seen is whether they can chase the revenue and still stay as a social network or whether they only way they can succeed is to become a product simply for recruiters and advertisers.