LinkedIn's mission is to help the world's professionals find their dream jobs. First, it has to find its own.
LinkedIn said it is trending toward hiring 1,000 employees this year, by far the most it's ever hired in a single year since it was founded by Reid Hoffman in 2003. About 40% of the company's new employees will be in engineering and research and development; 40% in sales; and 20% in general operations and marketing, said Brendan Browne, director of global talent acquisition.
To make that many hires and compete for talent with the likes of Google and Facebook, LinkedIn is turning around job offers as quickly as 24 hours after the interview process is completed, increasing its campus outreach, and selling the idea of proximity to its executive chairman and prominent venture capitalist Hoffman to candidates who may want to found their own start-up after a stint at LinkedIn.
The biggest hiring needs in engineering at the company are for experts in data analytics and data mining as well as core engineers, front-end developers, and Web developers. In sales, the company is recruiting liberal arts graduates -- as well as people transitioning from other careers like recruiting, strategy management and consulting -- with a passion for sales and for the LinkedIn product.
Perhaps it should go without saying, but candidates should have a fully completed and freshly updated LinkedIn profile page.
Post-IPO
So far, the company hasn't seen an exodus of employees who have cashed out their equity stakes post-IPO, Browne said. The number of candidates interested in working at the company has increased, Browne said.That's not unusual, say recruiters, because some job candidates only want to join a company that has the stability that comes from being publicly traded.
"Now that they're public, they can attract candidates who might not have joined a pre-IPO company because of the risk," said Andrew Nacsin, director of development at Redfish Technology, Inc., a recruiting firm.
LinkedIn still offers stock-based equity as part of its compensation. The company says that despite the company's shares opening on the New York Stock Exchange at $83 -- almost twice the $45 issue price -- there's still a lot of potential upside for new employees receiving equity. (The company's stock is currently trading around $78 per share).
Browne prefers to let potential hires "do the math," he said. Hiring solutions, one of the company's three revenue streams has an "addressable market is $25 to $30 billion," he said. "Last year we had $102 million of it. We're growing and getting more market share; how much of that market share do you think we can take...and how will that affect the stock price?"
Meeting the Boss
LinkedIn has a secret weapon to help it compete in today's feverish hiring war for technical talent, and his office is in the C-suite.
Not long after LinkedIn when public, Chief Executive Jeff Weiner had another important meeting aside from his first earnings call with investors. He had to greet a top engineering candidate the company wanted to hire. Unlike Google's Larry Page, Weiner doesn't sign off on every new hire, and he wasn't interviewing the candidate. It was instead a charm offensive to show that the CEO's door is always open. It's not uncommon for even junior engineers to meet Weiner if the company wants to hire them badly enough, said Browne.
Over the course of the next year, the company will increase its college recruitment of interns and new full-timers by as many as five times the current level, Browne said. Many of the company's data scientists come from academic backgrounds, and LinkedIn encourages them to publish journal articles and attend conferences to build relationships with engineering and computer science professors. Other employees team up with recruiters and go back to their alma maters to enhance the company's influence and prestige on campus.
The company also plans to be begin recruiting more heavily from international universities in Canada, Europe and India over the next year.
Interview Process
The LinkedIn interview process begins with a call or an email from one of its recruiters for an informational discussion about LinkedIn's mission and vision, and the candidate's goals. Next comes a phone screening with a hiring manager in the department the person is applying for. If that goes well, the candidate is brought in for a series of interviews with up to six different hiring managers, each taking up to an hour, for a half day of interviews.
Sales candidates will be asked to come in with a pre-prepared presentation on how they would sell one of the company's products to a client. Engineers are asked to solve technical problems on a whiteboard.
If all goes well, the company can make an offer as soon as the next day.
For technologists with an interest in distributed systems and analyzing big sets of data, LinkedIn argues that it offers one of the most interesting places to work in Silicon Valley.
Start Your Own Start-up
"The type of problems we have and the low hanging fruit that's out there in terms of having impact on people with data products -- this is the place to be," said Monica Rogati, a senior data scientist who, despite having been with the company for three years and through its recent IPO, says she doesn't feel compelled to move on.
Like its Mountain View, Calif. neighbor Google, LinkedIn also tries to attract entrepreneurial-minded engineers who want to take ownership over products, and even eventually start their own businesses.
"If someone wants to come in and start their own thing, that's part of our value proposition," said Browne. "Hopefully we can help them do that, and the founder of the company happens to be the biggest angel investor in the world."
Working at LinkedIn isn't a 9-to-5 job. Employees are expected to work the hours demanded of a start-up. "If you're setting out to tackle the vision that we have, it's not a 40 hours-a-week job," Browne said.
Write to Joseph Walker at Joseph.Walker@dowjones.com
