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LinkedIn’s Big Move: Aggregating All U.S. Job Listings
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With the announcement this morning that it would begin to aggregate jobs from U.S. employers, LinkedIn took a big step to building its Economic Graph, and realizing its plan to provide all the world’s open jobs to all the world’s workers.
Beginning June 2, LinkedIn will offer hundreds of thousands of jobs aggregated from the career sites and ATS’s of U.S. employers who don’t prohibit it. These listings will supplement a nearly similar number of listings employers pay for, but they’ll be made available only to LinkedIn members who actively search for them.
Called “Limited Listings,” these aggregated jobs will be cleaned of an employer’s paid listings to avoid duplication. The differentiation between this new program and LinkedIn’s paid Job Slots and Job Posts is based on active and passive seekers. The paid program places job posts before suitable (matching) candidates and delivers job suggestions to specific types of candidates based on their profiles and employer criteria.
The Limited Listings, explained a company spokesman, is “targeting a very different group of candidates. They only go to active candidates … Candidates who are looking for jobs.”
The announcement of the aggregation program is no surprise. The company has frequently discussed its vision of becoming the center of the employment universe.
Company leaders reiterated that goal in February when they announced LinkedIn had purchased Bright.com, a small but exciting startup that aggregated job listings and matched them to candidates by examining not just experience and skills, but multiple other factors of the sort found on many LinkedIn members’ profiles.
Now, in launching what it said is a test, LinkedIn is leveraging Bright’s job collection technology to begin offering the free Limited Listings. The company spokesman wouldn’t say how many employers will be represented in the new job board, but he did say it will double the number of jobs available on LinkedIn to about 700,000 in the days after Monday’s launch.
The move follows by two weeks Monster’s announcement that it was entering the competitive, and profitable, job aggregation business. Monster unveiled a major overhaul of its business model at an analysts’ meeting May 14 at its company headquarters in Massachusetts. Like the two leading job aggregators — Indeed.com and SimplyHired — Monster will also offer a pay-for-performance type of program.
For now, LinkedIn’s aggregation program is free. There are “no plans,” said the company spokesman, to add for-fee features to the Limited Listings program. At some point, after the test phase, it is almost inevitable that LinkedIn will seek to monetize the aggregated listings. Just as they do on Indeed and SimplyHired, employers will want to highlight their listings, paying for premium positioning at the very least. Bright’s matching technology, however, offers other fee-based opportunities to deliver job opportunities to targeted, active candidates.
In the meantime, the company spokesman said LinkedIn will evaluate user engagement and how the job board is used. The quality of the engagement and especially the quality of the applicants will also be part of the evaluation, although how that will be done wasn’t disclosed.