LinkedIn eyeing job recruiters for revenue

Professional networking site launches Talent Pipeline recruiting tool

Finding the right fit for an executive opening can be a long, laborious task.

LinkedIn thinks it can streamline this process with its new feature called the Talent Pipeline, and make money to boot.

This service, that is scheduled to roll out in the first half of 2012, will expand the offerings on LinkedIn's fee-based LinkedIn Recruiter Tool. 

Talent Pipeline, which  was announced by LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner on Tuesday at the Talent Connect conference in Las Vegas, Nev., is designed for recruiters, allowing them to aggregate all of the steps and leads gathered in the recruitment process. When candidates change elements of their profile, recruiters are automatically alerted to the changes. Recruiters within the same company can share and track where they are in the connection process so that efforts are duplicated or missed.

Sounds cool. But whether this new service will help LinkedIn wow shareholders is another story. LinkedIn shares were steady at $87.60 in early trading. The stock is down significantly from its first-day debut in May, in which it doubled to $94.25, after hiting a high note of $122.70.

The Mountainview-based company (NYSE: LNKD) attributes nearly half of its revenue in the second quarter of 2011 on the hiring solution services that it charges a fee for -- accounting for $58.6 million in that quarter alone.

“Recruiters are actively looking for more talent from more sources and managing all their talent leads across multiple tools," said Weiner, at the Vegas conference. "With LinkedIn Talent Pipeline, we’re extending our Recruiter platform and continuing our focus to connect talent with opportunity on a massive scale by providing a single place to manage and update these leads, wherever they are found.”

How to keep adding value

LinkedIn, with more than 120 million members around the world, has grown over its eight years in existence to become the gold standard in professional social networking and connection with business contacts. But other services such as a Facebook-based professional network called BranchOut has gained traction with $24 million in funding and more than three million active monthly users. 

To that end, the company continues to add value to its networking service, allowing recruiters as well and job seekers more ways to improve employment solutions.

Talent Pipeline can also be utilized to organize and facilitate promotions and transfers in-house as long as each candidate maintains a profile. The company is working with several global companies to help improve the services, including Red Hat, Netflix, Pfizer and PepsiCo.

While this service makes life for company human resource departments easier, it is also a convenient self-service for LinkedIn since it will likely lead to more people within companies to sign-up (especially if their company uses the service to work on in-house promotions).

This addition will also likely drive up the number of companies paying the monthly or yearly fee to use the Recruiter Tool on the site and that spells more money and more stock value for the social site.

According to the New York Times, the fragmented global recruiting industry has an estimate worth of $85 billion -- and it is clear that LinkedIn is poised to continue its revenue growth from its second quarter $120 million (which was already a 120% growth from the same quarter, a year prior.) 

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