Food, games, beanbags, scooters, robots, gorillas, fast growth, and smart people

Last week, the Wall Street Journal ran an article on the hiring spree in the Tech Sector. And while articles about job growth always catch my attention, this one was particularly relevant. As part of the Tech Sector, LinkedIn is not just a catalyst for job seekers but also a potential home.

This year, we’re expanding our Engineering, Analytics and Sales teams and will continue to round out our Product and Marketing teams, probably growing from 600 employees today to over 800 by the end of the year.

Like other tech companies, we find many of our employees through the LinkedIn network and internal referrals. We use the very products we’ve built -- things like people you may know, or faceted search -- to look for people with the right skills, keywords, and experience. We like to think that on the other side of that equation, job seekers have the ability to learn about us through their networks as well -- whether it’s by reaching out to current employees or learning more about the environment and culture here.

Click through to watch NBC Bay Area's @Work at LinkedIn

Towards that end, we’re kicking off a new series of blog posts this week about our recently hired employees -- most of whom have been here less than a year.  While our Careers page is useful, tweets like the title of this post offer some color, they don’t necessarily answer the question of what it’s really like here. To understand that, you’d want to know more about who the people are behind the scenes here -- what they are working on, what they care about, what they do on their own time, and why they chose LinkedIn.

We hope these posts will illuminate what we do in a way you haven’t considered before. After all, given that we’re all about getting people to jobs they love, it seems only fitting that we spend some time with the people behind those features that help you find those dream jobs. Stay tuned for more.