At the event, David Hahn, vice president of product management at LinkedIn, shared a sneak peek at the upcoming Referral Engine, a solution that will enable companies to generate more high-quality applicants by tapping the thousands or even millions of professionals in their employees’ LinkedIn networks.
Employee referral programs are widely regarded as the best source of quality hires, but they often suffer from a problem of awareness and accessibility. “Today, an employee can only make a referral if there’s a match between a job she knows about and a professional contact that happens to be top of mind,” explains Hahn. “But what about every other open job at her company, and all the talented people she knows – but isn’t thinking of? LinkedIn Referral Engine offers the first scalable solution to this problem.”
By drawing on LinkedIn’s unprecedented wealth of professional information and advanced job matching technology, Referral Engine will recommend the most qualified professionals from within employees’ LinkedIn networks for jobs across their organizations. Email and LinkedIn homepage reminders will suggest the best candidates and allow employees to make referrals in just a few clicks. Referral Engine is expected to go live in the first half of 2011.
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In addition to Referral Engine, LinkedIn unveiled Jobs for You Ads, which intelligently distribute job postings to passive and active candidates all across the web. Jobs for You is the first tool that allows companies to pick their audience based on LinkedIn profile data—including function, seniority, industry, and more—and distribute their jobs exclusively to individuals with professional backgrounds that match their hiring needs. This very high relevancy drives click-through rates up to four times the industry standard[1].
“The hiring solutions announced today further the power of LinkedIn’s extensive professional network by putting open jobs in front of the right candidates, no matter where they are on the Web,” said Hahn. “By using these new, targeted tools and harnessing the networks of their employees, LinkedIn customers will generate more high-quality employment leads and fill their open positions faster, while also increasing quality of hire.”
