How would you improve LinkedIn?

How would you improve LinkedIn? ( Adding few details from Harry's ans. below)

Explain Product: LinkedIn is a social network that allows professionals to develop their professional network.

Networking : search/find/send requests to relevant professionals

Newsfeed: create/consume relevant content, useful for professional or personal development. It also allows the creation of corporation pages/profiles for corporate communication.

Job marketplace: LinkedIn also boosts recruitment by allowing people to find and apply to job offers on one part, and the other time by allowing a head hunter to identify relevant profiles open to job opportunities.

Messenger: private communications between professionals

Linkedin Learning: Upload /Consume videos for new learnings around Industry best practices, new concepts or knowledge base regarding any specific Professional level topic/(s).

Its business model is based on Premium account(Job Seekers, HR and Sales)  and advertisements.

I like the product because it is:

1. Intuitive- Crawl, walk, run adoption and usage.

2.Useful - As a Job seeker, its solving my pain point and optimizing Job Application process

3.Innovative - Its first of its type to create a social platform for Professionals where you can share and learn from peer Professional experiences.

Its better than its competiors like Glassdoor, Indeed, Blind etc because of the nature of having 360 degree solution and a one shop stop for all Professionals. Also it has the biggest professional network globally which makes it impact all user types in big way when it comes to networking, sharing experiences and job opportunities.

Coming to the Question of How to Improve Linkedin.

Askinf few  Clarifying Questions from the Interviewer -

·       Is the goal to improve the entire platform or a specific feature? I would like to focus on Linkedin Job Marketplace product.

·       Is the improvement channel-specific - Web or Mobile? Assume Mobile since it has higher reach

·       What's the objective of improvement? - engagement, increase in revenue, acquisition. etc.

Based on Industrial data, >60% of Jobs are applied via Job Marketplaces. As the Network of Professional on linkedin growns bigger with each passing day, Company's and HRs will get more engaged with using Linkedint to Find right talent. So, I think it would be safe to consider its in 'Growth Mode' in PLC. In the growth mode Adoption, Engagement and Retention and Montization are topmost goals for a company.

Goal :I would like to assume that our Goal for improving LI is Retention since More retention means more engagement which funnels down to more revenue for the company via Ad Views and moving to Premium membership. Using this Metric , we can measure value to Customer as well as Business.

User Segments:

1. Job Seeker

2. HR Professionals

3. Sales and Marketing

4. Ad Agencies

I would like to focus on Job Seeker since its the key reason for the LI networking capability as well as aligns with company's mission the most. I also see the Job seeker community is the biggest in LI ,so any change made to this user segment will be of biggest impact to users and the business.

User Journey by Job Seeker :

1. Discover Jobs(Search manually)

2.View LI Job Recommendation

3.View Job Posted by a Network Connection(1st,2nd or 3rd level connection or shared by one)

4. Click Apply  

a. Opens up LI landing page for More details(if job was posted using LI easy Apply feature) 

b.Routed to Job Poster Company's Landing page got job application(Ex. Smart Recuiter , Workday etc)

5.Save Jobs to view/apply later

6.Enable Job Alert for a Specific Job result(based on filters like location, job title, experience level, company, salary etc)

7. Post a Job

Some of the Pain Points I beleive are:

1..Create new resumes fitting as per Job needs when applying in multiple companies

2. No way to get updates on Application. What stage it has reached?

3.Not much information @ Header level of Job Postings. Need to open and read through complete JD for each job

4. Post Job Apply: Right Interview Prep is another challenge for Job seekers pos

5. Post Application Process is spread across multiple application . Difficult to keep track. Job Seekers have to use multiple outside LI applications to gets contacted via Zoom, Phone, Google Meet for all rounds of interviews , use Email to get offer, use Docusign like apps to sign the contract etc.

I would like to Prioiritze the top two pain point here based on customer impact (if we solve this based on biggest pain points) and business value(engagement)

#2 and #4 

List Solutions:

For #2 :

1.Built a workflow by integrating with HR systems of companies like Workday/Smart Recruiters , so that Users gets notified of all application based changes and track progress on timely basis. Ask Users for one time logins to the company's Application system (if they applied via there ) linked to LI and crawl the status and feed back to job seekers. Notification Added whenever there is an update

2. Create a better workflow for Application tracking withing LI and Motivate HRs to update LI. Incentivise them by sharing better recommendation of Job profile of better candidate for free based on how frequently they update job status for each candidate in LI. Also give HR option to send status feedback for multiple candidates for same job. Win-win for Job Seeker and HRs/HMs. Notification Added whenever there is an update

3. Use a ML model to predict the '% chances of moving frwd vs not' for a candidate based on time of his application and trend captured by LI from HRs of the applied company in terms of speed and feedback given to candidate from past jobs applications.

4. Build a Rating and Review process for each company, which might give an opprotunity to both job seeker and HRs to share their experience with specific company and job postings.

For #4:

1. Mock Interview Panel for Job Seekers based on Volunteers to help outo join their company/similar industry or company. Motivate the volunteers by some form of Rating process(given by LI as well as Job Seekers who go through mock session) which will show on Volunteer's LI Profile as a badge. This will also give them sense of accomplishment.

2. Build a interview prep repository based on ML and AI and  integrate with Voice Assistant to train job seekers. Get a actual interview kind of experience.

3. Create a Marketplace tool for Mentors and Mentee where they can build partnership for acheiving goals of Job seeker

4. 'Pay it forward' (More of a social responbility) concept from Industry leaders like VPs, Sr. Directors etc to have working sessions for a group of Job Seekers based on same interest, company, job title etc.

Product:

LinkedIn is a social media networking platform for professionals to connect, follow industry leaders, company branding and job hunting, training at a broad level

When we say improve, are we looking at improve the acquisition of the users or the engagement of the existing users or increase the paid users?

Answer: Increase the Engagement of the existing users

Metric:

The ask is to improve the user engagement, which we could measure with below metrics

• DAU/MAU
• Average session duration/Time spent in a day
• More feature level metrics  like
  • # of users posting or commenting or liking a post
  • # of users searching and applying for jobs
  • # of users taking online learning sessions Etc.

Users groups:

Linkedin is a huge platform with varied features targeted at different user groups

Here are some of the user groups which use most of the features

1. LinkedIn influencer/Power user : Posts something few times a day, has huge number of followers (>1000)
2. LinkedIn occasional user:  Logs couple of times in a day, checks the feed, comments and shares atleast one time in a day; searches for job a few times in a week
3. LinkedIn casual users: Logs in couple of times a week, searches for job once a week/month, rarely comments or like a post

We are ignoring HR recruiters, Sales/Marketing team members as they are very active in the system to get candidates/leads respectively

We'll target the #2 group i.e. occasional users and see how we can improve LinkedIn for them thereby increasing the engagement

User needs and pain points:

1. The user want to keep himself updated with the new developments in his industry in terms of new technology, new process or a framework to do tasks better
2. The user want to know about the events that are happening in the city
3. The user want to know about the open jobs matching his/her profile
4. The user would like to showcase his/her work to prospective employers or other professionals
5. The user would like to be guided in getting better career opportunities or guidance in excelling at current role
6. The user would like to have a mentor/career coach
7. The user doesn’t know interview tips, CV preparation basics, targeted job applications and salary expectation from a certain company
8. The user doesn’t know how to sell his/her expertise as a freelancer to others

These are some of the requirements/painpoints that an occasional user has and we'll try to build our solution around the #2, #3, #5, #6 and #8 as those are problems big enough and when provided with better solutions would help with user engagement metrics and in turn help in bring more direct revenue as well. We'll see how below.

Solution:

Amongst the listed solution above, #1 and #2 can really hit home in terms of engagement i.e. increase in DAU/MAU, Time spent per session.

We can also measure feature specific engagement metric like, # of employers posting freelancing jobs, # of users applying for those, # of events posted, # of people attending etc. to gauge the success or failure of the feature

So overall, to improve LinkedIn i.e. to ensure that the user engagement level is high, LinkedIn can roll out a couple of features above like freelancing platform and Events platform to begin with. Although the effort is high, but these features would actually help in increased level of engagement and will also help in acquiring new users (Acquisition) and since the freelancing commissions and Event listing fees would also be involved, it would help drive some revenue numbers as well.