What LinkedIn’s New Jobs Widget Means

In our LinkedIn prospectus writeup, we argued that LinkedIn should “replace company “Careers” pages the way it’s so thoroughly replaced personal résumé pages.” Their latest feature does roughly that. LinkedIn now lets employers embed an “apply with LinkedIn” widget on their site. This has two key benefits:

• It extends LinkedIn’s reach into HR departments. They own résumés, references, and referrals; now they’re gunning for the rest of the HR department’s hiring infrastructure.
• It gives them a new source of high value links. When hypotheticalcompany.com/careers/ is a big link to LinkedIn, it means that LinkedIn ranks a bit better for “hypothetical company careers.” Multiply that by thousands of careers pages, and suddenly LinkedIn will naturally outrank the pages that don’t use the “Apply with LinkedIn” widget.
• It’s one more excuse to keep LinkedIn profiles updated, which raises LinkedIn’s value to paying customers, its CPMs on ads, and the pageviews it can multiply those CPMs by.

LinkedIn’s endgame is to own every scalable part of the hiring process. Creating a résumé isn’t scalable; searching them is. Building personal connections and weak ties isn’t scalable; turning them into a mathematically tractable graph is. This explains a lot of LinkedIn’s actions: why they don’t care about job boards but are ruthless about Facebook-based networking apps that use their API, for example. Investors comparing LinkedIn to Facebook are asking the wrong questions. Facebook is trying to build something completely new. LinkedIn is just trying to revamp the hiring process. They don’t have the same world-changing potential that Facebook does, but there’s a high and rising floor on how much revenue they can plausibly earn from shaking up corporate HR departments.