Linkedin Blog

LinkedIn has been sponsoring internal tech talks with high-tech luminaries for a while now. We’ve discussed opening it up to external software engineers and we’re pleased to kick this off with a panel discussion that I’ll be moderating next week, June 5, in Mountain View. Food will be served. So, just bring yourselves and friends interested in learning and networking.

We will not only have the creator of SCALA, Martin Odersky, here in person but we also have representatives of the most scaled SCALA implementation, which would include Nick Kallen of Twitter and David Pollak of the LIFT web framework.

Over 100,000 LinkedIn users have shared over a million professional news articles with their groups and connections, since we started offering the news sharing feature. We’ve received a ton of great feedback on the feature, with some of our users mentioning how inconvenient it was to participate in a group conversation given the additional step of returning to the news discussion page to leave a comment.

We’re now incorporating some of these suggestions we gathered, starting with the ActionBar. Moving forward, any user who clicks through an article shared on a LinkedIn group will be able to share and comment directly from the news article. You can also discover related news content through the same toolbar, without having to switch back and forth between the news discussion page (on LinkedIn) and the news article.

Let’s make a bet. A safe one. I’m sure there’s more than a few of you out there that have spent hours, even days crafting the perfect cover letter and polishing your resume for a group of prospective employers, only to never hear back from any of them.  You swear you knocked it out of the park, but you just didn’t get the response you were hoping for. The reality is that there were at least a dozen other people that did the same thing and thought they knocked their resume and cover letter out of the park too.

Whether times are good or bad, getting that extra edge has always been important. You may have the right experience, degrees and attributes, but when employers have stacks and stacks of resumes sitting on their desk, you need something that’s going to make you stand out, especially these days. Writing great cover letters and resumes are a good start – an essential one, at that. But how can you go beyond that?

On Cinco de Mayo, we celebrated our 6th birthday AND welcomed our 40 millionth member to the LinkedIn network!  With two great reasons to celebrate, employees invited their families to come to the office for an afternoon fiesta.  There were popsicles and margaritas, pin the tail on the donkey and a scavenger hunt, cupcakes and tacos, mini sombreros and big fun for adults and kids alike!

As we celebrate success, we keep top of mind the importance of supporting our community.  For this event, we partnered with the Bring Me A Book Foundation who provides libraries of high quality children’s books and read aloud workshops to under served communities.  Did you know reading aloud to children at an early age is the single most important activity for building eventual success in reading AND two-thirds of all low-income families and most low-income childcare centers and preschools have zero age-appropriate books?   Yes, that’s a zero!