Recession lifts social networking site LinkedIn

With more job seekers on the prowl, LinkedIn's traffic has doubled and its multiple revenue streams have turned into profit. Take that, Facebook and Twitter.

EMAIL  |   PRINT  |   SHARE  |   RSS
 
google my aol my msn my yahoo! netvibes
Paste this link into your favorite RSS desktop reader
See all CNNMoney.com RSS FEEDS (close)
By Jessi Hempel, writer

NEW YORK (Fortune) -- Looking for an online mirror of American economic woes? Check out the professional social networking site LinkedIn, where activity from Lehman Brothers employees and ex-workers spiked 315% from August to September of last year, when the bank was going through bankruptcy proceedings. LinkedIn's fastest growing region? Detroit.

Unlike the job seekers (and those fearing unemployment) that troll its jobs boards, LinkedIn is thriving in the recession: Overall, traffic has more than doubled to 6.9 million users in February from 3.3 million a year earlier.

For a short time it seemed LinkedIn's best days were behind it. After a big initial splash, especially with the professional set, LinkedIn seemed to lose buzz to fresher, jazzier sites such as Facebook, which has started to gain traction among Baby Boomers. (Facebook today has 175 million-plus members). But it has something the Facebooks and Twitters of the world do not: profits. For the past two years, it has been in the black, according to remarks that founder Reid Hoffman made at the World Economic Forum in Davos last January. With a billion dollar valuation, the company has raised close to $100 million so far. Hoffman told TechCrunch's Michael Arrington most of that cash has not yet been spent. "We can go public anytime we want to," he said.

The site's value comes from its network. With the number of job seekers far surpassing the available jobs in most professions, it's not enough to simply submit resumes to human resource departments. Those who find jobs must be aggressive about getting a foot in the door. "The number one way you find a job is through referral and LinkedIn is the biggest referral network out there,"said Charlene Li, founder of the research outfit Altimeter Group.

This worked well for Seema Kumar. Kumar, 31, began a job search on LinkedIn last summer while working as a product manager at software company VMWare. The site helped her connect to people from prior jobs with whom she'd lost touch. "I looked at Craigslist for postings, but LinkedIn had a different caliber or quality of posting," she said. "It offered a more comprehensive way for me to look for opportunities." In November she began work as a product manager at social application maker Slide.com, a job she found on LinkedIn.

Employers also increasingly rely on LinkedIn to recruit and vet their potential hires. Drew Patterson, vice president of marketing for Kayak.com, used the site to find two of the five employees he hired last year, paying $195 to list his job posts for 60 days. In addition to his fellow Harvard alumni, and his former Columbia Business School classmates, Patterson considers LinkedIn among his most useful job networks. "LinkedIn is great because you have some sense of where this person is and how they fit into your world," he said.

To capitalize on the enthusiam, the company recently installed a new management team. Founder Reid Hoffman became CEO and chairman. Jeff Weiner, who left Yahoo last year, took over as interim president. And former Google director Deep Nishar joined the site to lead product management in December.

This team will experiment with new ways to make the site both more relevant and more profitable. Unlike many traditional boards, which receive revenue from job postings and thus lose money when companies are hiring fewer people, LinkedIn has many ways to make money. In addition to job postings and traditional advertising, it has built a healthy business out of licensing its software to companies for internal recruiting. In addition, individuals can pay for premium subscriptions.

Not everyone believes that LinkedIn will be able to distinguish itself from other social networking sites over time. "How sustainable is it given that a lot of Facebook use is for professional interaction?" asks Gartner analyst Ray Valdes.

Indeed frustrated job seeker Cheryl Dowling, 33, from Charlotte, NC says she has made more potential job connections on LiveJournal and Facebook than LinkedIn, explaining, "The people that I have friended in LJ and Facebook are actual friends that seem more interested in helping one another out, and are more likely to take that extra few minutes to pass on information when they hear it."

But LinkedIn has never billed itself as a place friends go to connect. It's about professional presentation. And with one member signing up for the site every second, it's growing increasingly useful to employers and employees alike.  To top of page

Company Price Change % Change
Ford Motor Co 8.29 0.05 0.61%
Advanced Micro Devic... 54.59 0.70 1.30%
Cisco Systems Inc 47.49 -2.44 -4.89%
General Electric Co 13.00 -0.16 -1.22%
Kraft Heinz Co 27.84 -2.20 -7.32%
Data as of 2:44pm ET
Index Last Change % Change
Dow 32,627.97 -234.33 -0.71%
Nasdaq 13,215.24 99.07 0.76%
S&P 500 3,913.10 -2.36 -0.06%
Treasuries 1.73 0.00 0.12%
Data as of 6:29am ET
More Galleries
10 of the most luxurious airline amenity kits When it comes to in-flight pampering, the amenity kits offered by these 10 airlines are the ultimate in luxury More
7 startups that want to improve your mental health From a text therapy platform to apps that push you reminders to breathe, these self-care startups offer help on a daily basis or in times of need. More
5 radical technologies that will change how you get to work From Uber's flying cars to the Hyperloop, these are some of the neatest transportation concepts in the works today. More
Sponsors
Worry about the hackers you don't know 
Crime syndicates and government organizations pose a much greater cyber threat than renegade hacker groups like Anonymous. Play
GE CEO: Bringing jobs back to the U.S. 
Jeff Immelt says the U.S. is a cost competitive market for advanced manufacturing and that GE is bringing jobs back from Mexico. Play
Hamster wheel and wedgie-powered transit 
Red Bull Creation challenges hackers and engineers to invent new modes of transportation. Play

Most stock quote data provided by BATS. Market indices are shown in real time, except for the DJIA, which is delayed by two minutes. All times are ET. Disclaimer. Morningstar: © 2018 Morningstar, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Factset: FactSet Research Systems Inc. 2018. All rights reserved. Chicago Mercantile Association: Certain market data is the property of Chicago Mercantile Exchange Inc. and its licensors. All rights reserved. Dow Jones: The Dow Jones branded indices are proprietary to and are calculated, distributed and marketed by DJI Opco, a subsidiary of S&P Dow Jones Indices LLC and have been licensed for use to S&P Opco, LLC and CNN. Standard & Poor's and S&P are registered trademarks of Standard & Poor's Financial Services LLC and Dow Jones is a registered trademark of Dow Jones Trademark Holdings LLC. All content of the Dow Jones branded indices © S&P Dow Jones Indices LLC 2018 and/or its affiliates.