
In human resources departments, having your own Recruiter account is the expensive, must-have tool that denotes you’re a player. Today thousands of companies use LinkedIn’s flagship Recruiter product to hunt for skilled achievers. Rather than try to wring 20 bucks here and there from individual users, he refocused the company on selling a vastly more powerful service to corporate talent scouts, priced per user at as much as eight thousand per yearyear. The company was running a $4.5 million annual loss, paying bills mostly by hawking online ads and peddling “premium subscriptions” for as little as $9.95 a month to journalists, hedge fund managers and the like. Hardly anyone noticed, meanwhile, that LinkedIn shares have leaped 64% this year.Ĭompare this performance to three and a half years ago, when Weiner joined LinkedIn. In the first month after its May 18 IPO Facebook stock skidded an embarrassing 17%. Recent attention in the social space has focused almost entirely on Facebook, with its 900 million users, 28-year-old celebrity CEO and bumpy initial public offering. And in the center is the richest and fastest-growing opportunity: turning the company’s 161 million member profiles into the 21st-century version of a “little black book” that no corporate recruiter can live without. He draws three concentric circles to show how LinkedIn makes its money. And yet a few minutes later he rises from his chair, walks over to a whiteboard and energetically sketches a diagram that the world’s other giant social network can’t match. “I’m not going to get into comparisons with them,” he declares. LinkedIn’s chief executive, Jeff Weiner, doesn’t want to talk about Facebook.

Forbes Magazine: LinkedIn Profiles Have Made A Resume Into A Business Model
