Last week we launched the “Recruiting with LinkedIn” blog, a blog for recruiters and folks who rely on LinkedIn for their hiring needs. There are more than half a million recruiters using LinkedIn and our enterprise solutions to find and contact top talent. But as a professional you might already know that and may have received a few interesting job opportunities.
The new “Recruiting with LinkedIn” blog contains information about leveraging LinkedIn, and especially LinkedIn Talent Advantage, to recruit the best professionals. This blog will be a great source of information, featuring:
Latest news about LinkedIn Talent Advantage, our enterprise recruiting solutions – new features, service/maintenance announcements, etc.
Tips from users, or from LinkedIn staff
Links to the latest tutorials and screencast demonstrations
Event announcements – live events and webinars
A peek behind the scenes here at LinkedIn
Other interesting content – Polls, industry trends, staff interviews, etc
So, if you’re a recruiter or a hiring manager, feel free to subscribe to the the our Recruiting blog’s RSS Feed, and Twitter feed to ensure you are receiving the latest information from us.
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.
Given below are further details of the panel and how you can sign up for it.
Panel topic: LinkedIn Tech Talk Series – Going from SCALA to scale!
Date / Time: June 5 (Friday) / noon in Mountain View
Fill out the form (link above) with just your (a) linkedin profile and (b) email address. We’d love to open this up to everyone interested, but unfortunately we have only limited seating for the first 100 sign-ups. The last time we put together a similar event we had over 200 RSVPs in a few hours, so please be sure to sign up at the earliest.
Once we hit the limit, we’ll be sending you an email confirmation with details on location. Look forward to seeing you at the event. Questions? Leave a comment.
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!
Employees graciously donated over $1,400 dollars to donate two bookcases for local pre-schools in Mountain View! Keeping with our fiesta theme, the bookcases will be bilingual with Spanish and English books. Thanks to Bring Me A Book for all the fabulous work they do throughout the year and for partnering with us.
Thanks to Alice’s Restaurant for catering the food & drinks and to Kara’s Cupcakes in Palo Alto for providing 600 yummy mini cupcakes…if you haven’t had the banana caramel you should definitely try it – it was our favorite!
Thanks to all our members, our employees and their families for another great year! Olé!
Check out the rest of the pictures taken at the birthday party here
40 million members strong in 6 years, almost to the date! Its always fun to look back down memory lane, and what a year its been! Yours truly has been here for almost a couple of years, so I thought I’d give you a little perspective on some of the milestones we’ve crossed in the past year compared to the first 5 years:
First 5 years
In the last year
Members
22,000,000
40,000,000+
User Groups
50,000+
300,000+
Languages
1
4
Applications
0
11
Answers
1,000,000
2,000,000+
As you might guess from the chart above, we’ve spent the last year building functionality that help you: create, connect, and collaborate with your connections. A few key highlights from the past year:
• Group discussions
• LinkedIn Applications
• LinkedIn in Spanish
• LinkedIn in French
• LinkedIn In German
• Direct Ads
• LinkedIn Polls
• Company Profiles
• All new LinkedIn People Search
• LinkedIn iPhone app
This past year wasn’t just a success for LinkedIn, but even more importantly for our users as well:
• “About a week later, I was offered an amazing job at Microsoft in Boston, and it wouldn’t have happened without LinkedIn.” - Adam Conrad: future Microsoft employee
• “Within the first week, a former client responded and we connected. Out of that came aa $1 million consulting contract, just because we were able to connect and remember.” – Darrel Rhea: CEO, Cheskin
We’re looking forward to another great year. What will the future bring? Only time will tell, but we here at LinkedIn look forward to building it with you – our users.
Check out how some of our user success stories here
[Ed.note: This is a guest post by Scott Case, CEO of Malaria No More - a non-profit, non-governmental organization that aims to end deaths caused by malaria. Today is World Malaria Day and here are Scott's thoughts on the epidemic and what we can do to help fight it]
Over the past week, Ashton Kutcher’s race with CNN to one million Twitter followers showed the incredible power of new technologies and social networks to get a message out—and in this case, to help end malaria. Ashton leveraged his following on Twitter to raise awareness about malaria and drive donations to Malaria No More. But in today’s world of online communities, each of us has the same digital tools at our disposal to beat malaria. Each of us has the potential to influence our networks.
Networks open doors to the best expertise, to essential technology, and to financial resources that have a huge impact. We know that malaria can be stopped with simple tools like medicines, indoor sprays and mosquito nets. Momentum is building to end malaria deaths by 2015 – an ambitious goal, but achievable. As I mentioned earlier, it just requires the power of your network.
To commemorate World Malaria Day today, I’m asking the LinkedIn network for help. My question to you is:
How can you use your expertise and networks to help the malaria community?
- increase public awareness in donor nations and in Africa
- advocate for political support around the world and especially in Africa
- make leveraged investments in Africa that help save lives
Click here to answer my question, and then continue the conversation in our LinkedIn group, Linked To End Malaria. The group provides a forum for us to mobilize hundreds or (maybe) thousands of professionals in our networks to make a difference in the fight against malaria. There you can share your ideas, collaborate and take action with others who refuse to accept another death from malaria.
Ashton proved the power of his network with one million followers – let’s find out what the LinkedIn community can do with 40 million professionals.
Many of our readers may be aware that Reid Hoffman, one of the co-founders at LinkedIn, is also known for his angel investment in tech startups. Reid has also been one of many entrepreneurial voices who continue to reiterate the importance of encouraging entrepreneurship and it’s impact on bailing us out of the dire economic straits we find ourselves in today.
TechCrunch, a leading technology blog, and Founders Fund, a Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm, just announced an annual program honoring technology innovators for achievement and excellence in high-tech entrepreneurship, the TechFellow Awards.
For those of you who are interested, here’s a brief description of the awards. (Read more at TechCrunch)
The TechFellow Awards program will grant at least twelve fellows $25,000 each to invest in an early stage startup of their choice. Founders Fund will invest an additional $25,000 alongside those investments and request an additional right to invest another $250,000 when the company raises its next round of financing. In all, Founders Fund expects to devote around $3.6 million to the program.
We’re glad to announce the participation of both Reid Hoffman and Jeff Weiner in helping pick the winners. You should also check out Reid’s earlier Washington Post op-ed on spurring innovation and investments to help bail us out this economy. You can also check out Reid’s interview (see below) on Charlie Rose where he discusses similar topics.
Many of you trying to use LinkedIn between 2:18am and 4:08am US Pacific time this morning, and all of you trying to use LinkedIn between 6:10am and 7:43am, were unable to get in. This is not what we want for our users, and we are very sorry for the inconvenience caused. Rest assured, all of your postings and messages were sent out.
What caused the outage? LinkedIn uses a technology called “Message Queuing” within our site to allow our various services (for example, Network Update Service, inMails) to communicate with each other asynchronously, so that a sudden surge of usage on one part of the site will not affect performance on another. Starting early this morning, we ran into some issues with our Message Queuing services, which caused the message queues to back up.
What’s supposed to happen in this situation is that the message queues simply store all the pending messages, and then deliver them when the receiving service is ready for them.
However, when some of our message queues backed up this morning, the services that were trying to send additional messages were unable to do so. This caused the messages to back up into the systems trying to send the messages, causing them to fail.
We have restored the site to proper operation this morning at 7:45am US Pacific/ 3:45pm GMT, including delivery of all messages in the queue, and are analyzing why the message queues did not work so as to prevent it from happening in the future.
LinkedIn has grown by leaps and bounds this past year and currently we are adding professionals to our site at the rate of one user per second.
Behind the scenes, there are several dedicated teams of highly skilled people with (an unusually high tolerance for sleep deprivation), and a varied array of skills in areas such as capacity planning, network and server architecture, and web technology, and these teams are collectively known as the Linkedin Operations organization. All of these skills are continually focused on ensuring that the combination of hardware, software and data stored in our Data Center follows just the right ‘playbook’ to ensure that we offer you, a world class user experience. The primary goal for the LinkedIn Operations organization is for our site and partner applications to be available 24/7.
I am sure that LinkedIn’s operations team from our earlier days look back fondly on the time when our production infrastructure only needed to support the ‘tiny’ number of 2 million or even a paltry 5 million users. Fast forward to 2008, and with over 32 million users and a fast growing product portfolio, imagine the volume of hardware, software and data involved. It was time to expand our Data Center footprint so we can continue to offer our millions of users, a rock-solid and reliable service.
During a multi-month planning effort involving a large and cross functional team, plans were drawn up, revised, and re-revised. Project team members, in addition to their existing responsibilities, rose up to the challenge of architecting and implementing a world class physical infrastructure, on which we could deploy our applications and data. On December 6, 2008 that work culminated in LinkedIn’s latest addition to our portfolio of Data Centers going live to serve our customers’ Internet traffic, and because of that we are now better positioned than ever for the tremendous growth that lies ahead in the New Year!
A recent report by Juniper Research says that by 2013, mobile will be a $300 billion marketplace. To get a better picture of the digital distribution business, we talked to some experts in digital content: Jason Kilar, CEO of Hulu; Gregg Spiridellis, CEO and Co-founder of JibJab; and Mitch Rotter, SVP of Content and Acquisitions at Thumbpla
Online, Hulu ties advertisers to the best premium content in a well-lit environment, and JibJab offers personalized Sendables in line with its creative brand. These business models transfer naturally over to the mobile space, where businesses are adapting to sell advertising, services, creative content, and applications to deliver them easily. Thumbplay, for example, has negotiated countless agreements to sell games, music, video, graphics and ringtones across several mobile carriers.
As Google’s Android platform shipped last month on the T-Mobile G1 smartphone, it might be a good time to look at the business of digital and ask: where can my company add value in the mobile space? Mobile represents a wild west of opportunity for entrepreneurs, marketers, advertisers and content creators, while gateways like the iTunes App Store enable savvy pioneers to make a quick ROI from simple apps. With a $300 billion market cap over the next five years, expect mobile to draw a lot of attention from new industries and bit players alike. Most importantly, mobile lets businesses ask the question: what would you put in the pocket of every professional?
Getting a stellar new wardrobe can help you land your dream job, win a new client, land that promotion or impress an audience. Having a complete profile on a site like LinkedIn could also earn you a major business deal, help you build your own company or give you the power to network with decision makers in your business world.
Having a new wardrobe and a complete LinkedIn profile? Now that’s one heck of a professional power punch.
25 lucky LinkedIn professionals will each win a $1,000 wardrobe from Banana Republic as a result of a contest called the “Linkedin Profile Makeover” being held by LinkedIn and Banana Republic.
In order to enter the contest, all people have to do is simply make an update to their professional profile on LinkedIn. Even easy edits like adding your current work title, a past job position or your education earn you an entry into the contest. New users that create a profile and make an edit are also eligible to win.
…and just for taking part, everyone that makes an edit to their profile between today, October 29th and Saturday, November 22nd earns a free 25% off coupon that they can use either online or in a Banana Republic store.
If you’d like to learn more about the Banana Republic/LinkedIn contest details go to: makeover.linkedin.com
Now get out there and update your LinkedIn Profile so you can win one of those new wardrobes!
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[Ed. note: This is a guest post by 
