4 Months Down, What is LinkedIn upto?

It’s been more than 4 months since Microsoft acquired LinkedIn for a jaw dropping $26.2 bn deal. A lot of the people from & outside the tech industry were taken by a surprise due to its size & sudden nature, though it wasn’t all that much of a shock as since the starting of this year, LinkedIn has had difficult time.

LinkedIn shares halved during the initial months of the year due to its weak growth rates & few failed products accompanied by acquisition deals like Lynda.com pushed the board & management team of the company to look for a buyer. Having said that, the company was finally sold for 50% premium over its last closing price on the NASDAQ on 12 June,2016.

M&A of such huge companies usually take years to come into action and so can be thought off for the two tech titans. Since the acquisition, there have been some rapid changes in LinkedIn, especially at the product front with a renewed focus on India as its target market.

During Jeff Weiner’s visit to India later this year, LinkedIn rolled out new features like LinkedIn Lite, LinkedIn Placements. LinkedIn has a 37 million user base in India only behind USA which has 130 million. These strategies are aimed at helping the company boost up its revenue through its recruitment products.

You might feel that my views are quite critical of the company right now but I believe that recent steps taken by the world’s leading professional networking platform is in the wrong direction & non-aligned with its vision. Recruitment might be one of its revenue ringing feature but efficiently serving a recruitment product to a 400 million plus users is absolutely not an easy job. Many a times users have blown whistles about the ineffectivity of LinkedIn’s recruitment features. Ultimately as a job board there is only too much a platform like LinkedIn can do for its users & I believe revamping its ailing feature wouldn’t help them in the longer run.

Hours before writing this article, Facebook, the social media juggernaut which contrary to LinkedIn has enjoyed a bumper year, officially rolled out its new Workplace by Facebook. We usually draw comparisons between tech companies & these two are no exception. Facebook unlike LinkedIn has enjoyed a smoother ride since the time it debuted its IPO in 2012, partly due to some very successful acquisitions like Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus VR.

With the launch of features like Facebook live and now Workplace, Facebook seems to making all the right move. Workplace is an enterprise only product built to serve its massive clientele which drives its marketing & advertising strategies through its Facebook page. A careful analysis might help you realize that a feature like Workplace would have been very well suited to LinkedIn due to its nature.

The tag of being world’s biggest professional networking platform hasn’t come easy for LinkedIn but only if it could revamp itself to be more of a professional networking platform and less of a recruitment or a job board then it might just do a world of good for them.