Recently, the most prominent career-focused social networking site LinkedIn underwent its first major redesign in quite some time. As a talent acquisition pro, hopefully, you’re a power user of the platform, either in its free iteration or with a Recruiter seat. With such a drastic change in design and functionality, you’re probably wondering how the new look and feel will help or hinder your ability to find and communicate with great candidates.
Not to fear, we’ve got you covered. Here at Kinetix, we’ve gone into the lab to review all the new changes LinkedIn has to offer. Let’s walk through all the important changes and what they mean for you when it comes to attracting and retaining the best talent.
- A Sleek New Interface. LinkedIn’s new visual design and layout is eerily reminiscent of Facebook’s current look. By simplifying the design and putting a new Facebook-like feed front and center, LinkedIn can capitalize on users’ familiarity with a widely-used social networking user experience. At Kinetix, we’ve also noticed that the improved news feed is featuring more relevant careers-focused content and fewer posts and images from people looking to go viral. Hopefully, this change will allow you to break through all the noise and find the content that’s important to you.
- Emphasis on Communication. LinkedIn has also retooled the site to focus more on messaging and communicating with candidates or prospects. They’ve brought a real-time messaging interface to every page of the site that allows you to have conversations on the fly without having to navigate to the previously clunky message page. We think this is a real improvement over the previous iteration and can certainly help you have more meaningful and productive interactions with candidates on LinkedIn.
- A Supposedly New Search Function. As a recruiter or talent acquisition pro, the search feature of LinkedIn should be one of your go-to’s when sourcing candidates. LinkedIn has streamlined the search feature and now lumps all options to view people, jobs, and companies into a single search portal. They’ve also claimed to have built a more intuitive search feature that brings up more accurate and relevant results. With our limited time on the new platform, those claims remain to be seen, but we’re glad to see them moving to prioritize the search function for everyone.
Hopefully, our brief walkthrough has given you insight into the new features and tools on LinkedIn. With these changes, you’ll be ready to source great talent on the site easier than ever before. Drop us a comment below and let us know what you think of the new redesign. We’d love to hear your thoughts!