Companies jumped on the internet wave to respond to market changes, and just like now, anyone who didn’t ran the risk of being left behind. At the end of the 1990s, online job boards such as OCCMundial and CompuTrabajo were already seen, while LinkedIn, as a social network oriented towards the professional field, was launched in May 2003. Two years later, the platform presented its first employment tool. and its premium subscription service.
Unlike job boards, LinkedIn’s value proposition was to be a meeting point between employers and job seekers, and that platform users could join communities of interest, follow companies, and connect with other professionals. to create a network of contacts and networking.
In 2008, LinkedIn already had 17 million users and in parallel social networks such as Facebook and Twitter were growing, while others like Hi5, which was acquired by Tagged, or MySpace gradually declined.
For Cuevas, the success of LinkedIn responds to the fact that the platform has evolved along with the labor market. It spurred a paradigm shift when its founders, Reid Hoffman and Konstantin Guericke, realized that social media was valuable for passive recruiting.
Passive candidates are those who are not looking for work or who spend little time looking for a job, but when faced with a good job offer they could consider changing companies. Noticing this, Americans turned the classified job search model on its head and created a way to allow recruiters to find passive candidates, as well as active ones.
LinkedIn and the job search
LinkedIn was launched in Mexico in 2013, a year later it enabled a map of the digital economy to discuss trends in the future of work, and in 2016 Microsoft bought the company for $26.2 billion. This acquisition allowed the platform to continue innovating to offer improvements to users and ensure that the professional was at the center of strategies and decision-making, says the director.
Among the bets was the creation of its mobile application, through which today 57% of the 9 billion pieces of content that are published weekly on the social network are generated. They also offer hiring solutions to organizations, from how to post a position within the careers tool to how to create a compelling employer brand.
The showcase of companies Ryan Roslansky assumed the general direction of LinkedIn in 2020 and two years later the company opened offices in Mexico. Worldwide, the social network serves 59 million companies and has 900 million users in 200 countries. Cuevas refers that Mexico is in the top of the 10 markets with the highest subscriber growth.
Currently, 19 million LinkedIn users are Mexican and the platform also serves 146,000 companies of different lines of business, of which 90% are SMEs. One of them is Expertos en Competencias, a management and management skills training company, which within its portfolio of services offers personnel search through headhunting.
Lyz Escalante founded this company in 2017, but she has been using LinkedIn for 10 years to recruit managerial, administrative, and business decision-making profiles. Before, he used to use job boards such as Bumeran and OCC Ejecutivo, now most of the profiles he looks for are found on the social network. “Job exchanges as we knew them years ago are already becoming obsolete.
What LinkedIn offers is a great network, when we publish a vacancy we receive many candidates not only from Mexico, but from different parts of the world. There we can see what type of content they share, the projects they have done, recommendations, the CV, courses they have taken through LinkedIn Learning and even the platform offers you to test them to see how much they align with the profile”, explains Escalante.
Among the improvements that the businesswoman observes in this network, throughout the 10 years she has been in Mexico, is that the recruiter can now access the candidate’s external networks, send him direct messages, and get to know him better when he posts a video CV of 30 seconds into your LinkedIn account login.
“This platform has become the easiest way to access the profiles we need,” he says. However, a trend that he sees in other networks like Instagram and TikTok is the publication of reels. “That would give LinkedIn a plus because it would be accessing generations that come with these new ways of making content and who will soon be our customers.”