After its successful IPO today, LinkedIn will aggressively hire engineers and developers, and is considering new office space in Silicon Valley and in new satellite offices around the country.
LinkedIn's corporate mission is to connect professionals to career opportunities "at massive scale." With over 100 million users, it's on its way. Now the company will need to scale up its workforce so it can continue to expand its user base, roll out new products, and keep Wall Street confident that it can meet the expectations its huge stock price has set.
While declining to specify how many new employees it will add in the next year, the company is looking for more commercial real estate space to accommodate new staffers in Silicon Valley, and is considering opening satellite offices away from its Mountain View, Calif., headquarters to expand its recruiting pool, said Steve Cadigan, vice president of people operations in a recent interview.
Right now, 50% of its new hires are on the technology side, Cadigan said, and all but one of their engineers are based in the San Francisco Bay Area. That could change, though, because of the fierce competition for the best engineers among startups and tech giants like Google.
"We have to look at things like growing teams not just here. This pond is getting fished pretty heavily," Cadigan said of Silicon Valley.
LinkedIn's staff has grown steadily since it was launched out of Reid Hoffman's living room in 2003. At the end of 2010, the company had 990 employees, and by the end of March 2011, it had added around 300 more, bringing the total staff to nearly 1,300, according to documents filed with the SEC. Of the total workforce, 48% are in engineering, product development and customer operations; 38% in sales and marketing, and the rest in general and administrative roles.
The three biggest hiring areas for LinkedIn's technical teams are: search engineers, user experience designers and data scientists. As more of its members use LinkedIn on their mobile devices, the company has an increased demand for Android and iOS developers, Cadigan said. And as the site scales, the company will need more back-end engineers to help build infrastructure.
"We started 2010 with maybe about 15 or 20 people in web development and UED [user experience design], and we've probably got 75 now," Cadigan said. The company has also added a number of new search and data engineers.
Recruiting the best recent college graduates has become a priority. "We just tripled down on our new grad hiring," Cadigan said. "That's been a big change for us this year." After hosting 60 interns last summer, the company will expand the program to up to 70 interns this year. A majority of last year's interns were made into full-time hires and LinkedIn hopes to maintain that conversion rate this year, Cadigan said
There are a few different ways to get a job offer from LinkedIn. About a third of new hires come from managers within the company who find candidates through their own network. Up to 40% come through employee referrals, with the rest of new employees being hired through the company's recruiters, Cadigan said.
Its product development costs, which consist primarily of salaries, benefits and stock-based compensation, more than doubled from $29.36 million in 2008 to $65.1 million in 2010, according to documents filed with the SEC.
According to a 2009 survey from the National Venture Capital Association, 90% of the hiring at venture-backed companies occurs after an IPO.
In its most recent report on earnings, LinkedIn said it had $93.93 million in net revenue in the first quarter of 2011. The company has three revenue streams, with almost half coming from hiring solution products like the LinkedIn Recruiter tool that allows companies to search the entire LinkedIn user base for desired skill sets and experience. Marketing revenue -- primarily display ads on the site -- accounted for 30% of net revenue, and premium subscriptions accounted for 21%.
Write to Joseph Walker
