Linkedin Blog

At LinkedIn, our mission is to connect talent with opportunity. The Dublin-based Talent Acquisition team decided to participate in the Ireland JobBridge program last year to bring this mission to life in our offices. The JobBridge program was designed by the Irish government to give the unemployed opportunities to gain valuable work experience while retaining their jobseeker allowance to help them find new opportunities. At LinkedIn, we saw this as a chance to give some bright individuals useful experience and exposure to how professionals can leverage LinkedIn.

Our first JobBridge interns came on board nine months ago and so far, two have successfully applied for full-time positions at LinkedIn and an additional four more are gaining valuable work experience as JobBridge interns. Here’s what our first two JobBridge Interns have to say about their experience.

As college basketball fans across the nation focused on honing their brackets, LinkedIn created its own version of March Madness for students in New York.

This month, employees in NYC spent a day mentoring college students in the area. It was all part of InDay, a monthly program where LinkedIn employees take a day away from their normal jobs to focus on something meaningful to them. This month’s theme was Mentor[in], which brought us to local colleges in the area.

Imagine if you were transported to a foreign land, penniless, not knowing the native language, surrounded by foreigners who you’ve only seen in fatigues. With just one day’s warning, my mother packed up our meager belongings, my brothers and I who were 7, 3, and 2 years old at the time, and left behind her home and her third child. My parents struggled with the idea of leaving all they had, but they knew that the option of staying was not an option. My father who was a helicopter pilot for the South Vietnamese Air Force would be quarantined in a concentration camp if they had stayed.

Saigon fell to the Communists on April 30, 1975. On April 29, 1975, my father flew us out of Saigon while under fire from the Communists. Somehow, we made it in one piece to Thailand. From there, the Americans flew us to Fort Chaffee, Arkansas.

LinkedIn is a truly inspiring place to work. That’s in large part due to the people who work here who, in addition to their day-to-day jobs, strive to better themselves, their communities and the world. And I couldn’t be more thrilled that LinkedIn supports some of their efforts via the Transformation Grant program.

Transformation is the most important tenet of our culture at LinkedIn. In 2011, we launched the Transformation Grant program to bring this tenet to life. Grants are annually awarded to LinkedIn employees in support of their efforts to transform themselves, their families, their communities, and/or the world. In 2012, grant winners embarked on life-changing trips that involved building schools, helping family members, teaching programs, etc. Truly inspiring stuff! Most inspiring though is that most of the grant winners were already embarking on these paths. The grants simply amplify their efforts.