Linkedin Blog

Editor’s Note: This is part of a series of blog posts by LinkedIn’s rockstar summer interns. Today, we hear from one of our international interns Yuan Daisy Gao who is pursuing a Master of Engineering, Computer Science degree at Tsinghua University.

When LinkedIn recruiter Jamie Thai woke me up one morning to give me my internship offer, I officially became one of LinkedIn’s first international interns. This summer, four interns from China and the UK flew across the world to work at one of the most exciting companies in Silicon Valley.

Editor’s Note: This summer, two LinkedIn employees came up with a wild idea – to swap jobs, homes, and cars for a month, bringing their families along for the ride. Rich Wong, Senior Director of Finance, is based in Mountain View, California and Sharon McCooey, International Finance Director, is based in Dublin, Ireland. Rather than dismissing the idea, our management team encouraged them to go for it. Below is a he-said, she-said account of their adventures.

Rich: I love working at LinkedIn and here’s why. Crazy ideas aren’t so crazy. People are encouraged to come up with new out-of-the-box ideas and managers tend to support these new ideas. A perfect example of this was when Sharon approached me about doing a job swap – including swapping cars and houses too! At one point, I was worried and joked with her about wanting to swap families too (like the TV show “Wife Swap”).

LinkedIn hackdays are a special day every month when our engineers are encouraged to work on something new and innovative. This month, we extended this spirit of innovation beyond the engineering team in our second bi-annual Innovation Challenge.

To help foster this challenge, the LinkedIn Idea Bank was born. The LinkedIn Idea Bank is a new internal website  created and managed by employees. It leverages the LinkedIn API and contains features to handle idea creation, such as handling slides and video content, as well as features like search, voting, commenting and tagging to enable engagement and participation by the whole company. With this in place, employees leveraged this opportunity to share their ideas with the entire company: teams were formed; ideas voted on; feedback from peers, managers and executives was given; and ideas were iterated on. In just one week, the LinkedIn Idea Bank had 3,507 votes, 389 comments, 152 projects submitted, and 8 minutes on average spent on the site by employees! LinkedIn employees submitted a wide range of ideas from internal productivity tools to LinkedIn site features to using LinkedIn for charitable opportunities.

LinkedIn Ads is a great way for members and businesses to deliver compelling and relevant opportunities to LinkedIn members.  Until now, these ads have only been available in English, however it’s always been our goal to expand languages across the 200 countries where we operate.