How do you increase the paid subscription base on LinkedIn?

Let me describe LinkedIn as I know.
LinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It serves to help professional take connected, learn about the things happening in the industry trends through posts from fellow professionals. It also provides platform to showcase your background and talents through personal profiles. Co-workers, managers and clients can post message/recommendation on their interactions with you.

This enabled LinkedIn to have a rich database of all the professional and now serves as one of the largest source of resume/database for recruiters. So as part of their offering, LinkedIn provides services to companies & recruiters to tap into this database & reach out to candidates for a subscription. There are other services like channels

In addition to this, LinkedIn acquired Lyda as educational platform on LinkedIn.
Professional can upgrade their free profile to premium to gain better visibility of themselves to recruiters and alike.


 

When you say "increase the paid subscription base on LinkedIn" what exactly do you mean ?
- Increase the number of professional upgrading their accounts to Premium ?
- Increase the number of recruiters/companies using their platform ?
- Increase the number of advertisements on their platforms ?

Lets assume the goal is to increase the number of paid subscription (premium) of the candidates/professionals.
The aim is to increase the premium subscription by 10% over the next year.

People who subscribe to premium memberships can be classified in several ways, I am going to use the intent as my criteria here.
1) Job seekers - Candidates who are looking for jobs either actively or passively want their profile to be more visible to potential employers. They can further sub divided, let leave it here for now.
2) Consultants - Generally not an employee of any company but offer their expertise on short term contracts & like to keep their profiles widely visible.

As I focusing on Premium membership for individual, I will not be elaborating on other user segments of Linked in

1) Job Seekers:
Within these we can break them down further as the needs of each of these are unique.
a) Active Job seekers - Need help to profile themselves, training and better visibility
b) Active Job seekers - Do not need help but just visibility
c) Passive Job seekers - May or may not need help but can use linked in resources to hunt for better opportunities for them in stealth mode. Handle some of the basic and initial exchanges with potential employers. The services should screen out noise and filter out opportunities that do not meet their needs. Challenge works, $$ increase etc.
2) Consultants - Need visibility to gain short term work. Linkedin can work as their agent.

Here are some possible solutions
1) For 1a, provide special premium membership with unlimited support model, get the candidates from resume, interview training and education material uplift their talent. This premium service should be costed out.
2) For 1b) , they probability need just to curate their profile and present to various employer which is largely done today with premium membership
3) Build a new engine to service the passive job seeker with active monitoring industry trends, comparing their current packages ($$, Tech etc) to opportunities . This process should provide them the feedback of success rate for their aspirations
4) Lead generation for Consultants.

Solutions 1 & 2 are very common and unlike to generate much volume. There is large pool of employed people than job seekers. So lets go after the biggest pool. Even if we acquire 5% of this pool, it is bigger than the whole of the active job seekers.

Build a new engine to service the passive job seeker with active monitoring industry trends, comparing their current packages ($$, Tech etc) to opportunities . This process should provide them the feedback of success rate for their aspirations


The solution will provide option to enable passive job seeker on linked in profile (Only visible to Linked in).
As a teaser, linked in can provide some trail offers like they do for Premium today.

Once the candidates subscribes to this service have them provide the current state of things of them. Make it automated as much as possible so the candidate do not have to take long hours to setup this. It can be AI generated & let the candidates tune it. It does not need to be one time, between AI and Candidate an ongoing tuning.

The engine will start evaluating the candidate and the industry considering factors like location, years of experience, trends, Opportunity comparison of growth, $$ etc...

Example : A candidate is working in Silicon valley with a certain profile. He/She especially passive candidates are not going to research other locations like Seattle, Austin in depth. The engine could possibly recommend that taking up a job with XXXX company in the early state of technology, or regional growth would yield a good career growth than in Silicon valley. I am pretty sure, some of the folks who took that chance with amazon & moved to Seattle can speak to it.


Metrics for success :
1) Number of conversion into premium subscription
2) Number of views on this topic on initial launch (Leading indicator of (1))
Secondary metrics to lead the success of primary goal
1) No. of opportunities the algo will be able to present to candidates