5 Questions with LinkedIn’s Robert Leathern
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Written By Reprise Media | October 12, 2005 | Share This
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Back in January we told you about LinkedIn, a relationship-driven networking tool that’s growing in popularity among the business set. SearchViews recently had an opportunity to interview LinkedIn’s General Manager of Advertising Services Robert Leathern as part of our “5 Questions” series. Enjoy!
1. Where do you see LinkedIn fitting into the competitive landscape? Who do you consider your primary competitors? Do you consider yourself a vertical search engine? (job search, vendor search, vc search ,etc.)
LinkedIn is somewhat unique (no, really!) since we’re aiming to be the service where every professional maintains his or her business profile. We are then building features around that like job or employee search, vendor recommendations, contact and address book features. The key underpinning is that in the business world, technology helps make us more productive but as they always have, relationships matter.
2. How does LinkedIn leverage its rich data about individuals to supply them with targeted ads? What are some of the major challenges facing you right now as you oversee LinkedIn’s ad business?
We’ve only recently started to build some of our targeting capabilities and expand our advertising business, making sure to do it the right way. We’re focused on providing highly relevant business advertising to our users – advertising that will actually add value and help people do their jobs better. The great thing about it is that a healthy ad business will also help support the free basic version of the product and allow us to continue to offer a robust free service to every professional. And for advertisers, we offer a highly relevant audience, so it’s really a win-win for all parties.
3. LinkedIn has occasionally been criticized for its potential as a distributor of spam. What constitutes ‘legitimate use’ to you and what is outside the limits of acceptable? How will you keep up the level of quality as your service grows?
One of the reasons I joined LinkedIn in the first place was because privacy and trust is and has been so central to the company’s model and continued success. A very small percentage of users sometimes try to invite more people than they should, and generate annoying emails. We take lots of precautions and react quickly to shut down any of these problems. Our subscription product includes ‘reputation’ features that ensure that direct contact requests within LinkedIn are well targeted or senders are penalized. We are very conservative when it comes to user privacy and it’s helped us to continue to attract the highest-quality professionals from around the globe, 3.8 million and counting.
4. You guys launched LinkedInJobs back in March, the latest of a series of premium offerings. Can you give us a hint as to what markets you’re planning to take on next? It seems like you’ve been mostly focused on the B2B end of things. Would something like online dating for like-minded professionals be out of the question?
Well, we recently put out subscription services which allow paying members to directly contact people within LinkedIn as well as through introductions (we hide the person’s name and contact information until they agree to make contact with the sender of the request), and it’s been very well received and is exceeding our expectations. It’s safe to say we still have a lot of work to do adding more features on the business side so don’t expect us to do anything like that anytime soon! You should see some things that extend the platform further, like new enhanced address book and Outlook add-in features we’re launching, as well as things like the recently-announced integration with AOL Instant Messenger.
5. How has LinkedIn changed the traditional job hunting paradigm? What are the legal implications of allowing employers free access to exchange information about former employees?
LinkedIn allows both the traditional active job seeker to positions relevant to him/her, but also just as importantly, we are providing a mechanism for those with great job opportunities to reach out to passive candidates in a way that respects their contact preferences and goes through trusted intermediaries. Another thing that people don’t always realize is that LinkedIn allows potential employees to do due diligence on the hiring manager and the company – that is something very valuable that hasn’t been easy for people to do before and should (hopefully) mean that the right people are ending up accepting the right job opportunities. As to your legal question, I couldn’t really offer an informed opinion as I’m not a lawyer (much to my lawyer-father’s chagrin, but thank goodness!).
Topics: Interviews |
Hello everyone — I’ve since moved on from LinkedIn to join Root Markets, but continue to maintain a personal blog at http://www.analystblog.com. I hope you’ll join me there and let me know if you have any questions!