Linkedin Blog

Sometimes business opportunities grow legs. Gregg Spiridellis found out in 2004 when a video by his digital studio, JibJab, took off. Though JibJab had been producing since 1999, their video “This Land” touched a nerve during the heated election year and was soon ubiquitous, even being played in Antarctica and the International Space Station. And this before the advent of YouTube.

Gregg was inundated with offers, emails… and LinkedIn requests. Having never heard of the site before, he sent off a “flaming” email to customer service. But Gregg now calls LinkedIn “the best thing in the world”, and uses it regularly to manage the growth of his studio. He’s used LinkedIn Jobs to recruit and find the best talent, saving tens of thousands in recruiter fees. He reviews polished profiles to compose job specs. And perhaps most impressively, he conducts competitive intelligence research on LinkedIn Companies to help reverse-engineer his own org as it grows.

In November 2008, we rolled out the new LinkedIn Search platform after many months of design and technical work.  Listening to the LinkedIn community is extremely important to us, and search is an application that millions of LinkedIn users depend on to get their jobs done everyday.

It has only been a little over a month since the full launch, but the results of that effort have been amazing.  We’re already seeing a huge increase in the number of searches on the site on a daily basis.  As more and more people use the platform, they are discovering more of the more advanced features built into LinkedIn search.

Last year about this time, Kay offered some New Year’s resolutions on how to jump-start your career. As we kick off 2009, many are looking for the best ways to find meaningful employment, and a good place to start is one’s own network. A recommendation from a trusted colleague can outweigh a stack of Ivy League résumés. In fact, when Randall Rothenberg went looking for a Chief Officer for the Interactive Advertising Bureau in 2007, he turned to his LinkedIn network first.

“I realized … the place to go to begin that search was going to be my LinkedIn network,” Randall told us. “If anyone can lead me to the kind of person with the kinds of capabilities I was looking for, it’s this set of people.” Randall posted the job on LinkedIn and began filtering candidates.