With close to a billion users worldwide and over 100 million just in India, LinkedIn is emerging as the social network that matters for professionals. It is also becoming a place to learn and connect with experts, in some ways like a knowledge hub of the world. In this podcast with Nandagopal Rajan, Tomer Cohen, Chief Product Officer, LinkedIn, explains how the platform is changing and doing its bit for the global economy. Edited excerpts: Is LinkedIn the new Facebook? Cohen: LinkedIn always existed for professional opportunities. So, I think it's quite different from how you think about the regular social network. Our goal has always been how to connect professionals to make them more productive and successful. People actually put in a lot of thought into what they post on LinkedIn compared to other platforms. Is this something that you have seen? Cohen: We have been building the LinkedIn creation tools and the feeds for quite a while now. But we have seen quite an acceleration with the pandemic. We saw the transition of professional conversations and communities online. There was a mass kind of move online because offline experiences don't exist anymore, especially in the workplace. We used to have those water cooler conversations and sharing that moved on as well. And that actually brought a lot of authenticity to conversations. What we saw was also a desire for a lot more knowledge sharing on LinkedIn. So I think when you come to LinkedIn, you think about it as the ultimate workplace experience. And in that way, there are hallway conversations about what's interesting to know right now, but it's also knowledge conversations. And so if there is a problem I'm trying to solve, an idea I'm looking to unlock, there's someone on LinkedIn, who's been there and done that and you can access those people. You are seeing that shift to what is knowledge and how can I inspire and empower others with my own journey and my own skills. Is it also triggered by the fact that the pandemic took away all those events where you would network and meet people? Cohen: When it comes to events during the pandemic, we have seen tremendous growth. We are still seeing events growing 75 per cent in creation, and attendees growing at 30-34 per cent year-over-year. So really, the idea of coming together as an online community on LinkedIn, it's really accelerated well beyond, you know, the years of 2020 and 2021. And we are seeing that continue. And that's where I think LinkedIn is becoming that destination for professionals to come together to share ideas, but also to come together for events. Recently, we had the Prime Minister of the UK doing an Ask-Me-Anything on LinkedIn. So, it has also become a central point for leaders to have conversations about economic policy, or product conversations about companies or trends in the marketplace. It's really becoming that central point for professional conversations. How else is LinkedIn changing for the post-pandemic era? Cohen: There's tremendous momentum right now. We actually just announced that we are over 930 million members and growing really fast. We surpassed 100 million members in India recently. India is one of our fastest growing markets, not just in numbers joining but also messaging, job seeking, and learning. India is actually incredible when it comes to learning, with some of the fastest-growing learning hours we are seeing. In fact, I think India is 2x the global average for learning, which is incredible, and it shows a lot about the appetite for skills and learning in the market itself. For us, it is really doubling down on helping professionals connect with the skills and knowledge they need to be able to access great career opportunities. And we are seeing tremendous growth there. The power of LinkedIn is to bring two professionals together. One person's open role on their team is somebody else's dream job. One person's idea is somebody else's learning. One person's product is somebody else's productivity. And facilitating that interaction is really what makes things very, very unique. It is also an experiences hub right now people are sharing their experiences so that you learn from it. This is not something you would really see on the other platform. Cohen: For LinkedIn, it's really about stuff. You know, the stuff you experience, the stuff you want to share with the goal of potentially empowering people but also building a reputation for yourself. And I think that's great for building your own professional journey on LinkedIn as well. But you do see a lot more of here's how I solved something. We are seeing a lot of tools shared on LinkedIn, codeshares, and people showing their innovations. And it gives me joy to see people seeing somebody else's craft and saying I want to have that career. Posts on LinkedIn have more traction and much more reach and engagement than they would elsewhere. Is this the algorithm at work? Cohen: We've been evolving a lot. The LinkedIn feed, when I was leading the pack early days, was trying to move towards conversation, sharing professional conversations. And ever since that he could evolve and get more into knowledge conversation. So, when you build a network on LinkedIn, that's your network where everyone will ideally know you and are looking forward to engaging with you and those interactions are great. We also know that people come to LinkedIn to find great advice or knowledge. So, we have been doing a lot of work to really focus on connecting creators and their audiences through topics they are interested in, in the ideas they're interested in. So, really when you find more traffic and more views on LinkedIn and more followers it also tends to be the ones who are most interested in your content or are interested in learning from you. How is LinkedIn evolving for the era of AI? Cohen: We have been building with AI for many years. In fact, I have two courses on AI because of the way we were building on LinkedIn and I wanted to bring it to the fore so others can learn as well. We often looked at AI as the matchmaker. How can we best connect job seekers with their dream companies? How can we help connect brands with buyers? How do we connect communities of professionals which have great content, and great podcasts with followers of that content? But now with generative AI models, we can actually think further, we can start elevating the capabilities of every professional by offering this notion of a copilot, a coach that can help them on their journey. A coach who can help them be more productive and successful. There are a lot more opportunities for us to really bring AI to the front and give it in the hands of members so they can do their job and they can really kind of elevate their career to a whole new level. I'm really excited about what's going to come out soon. Everything from helping you build your profile better to helping to hire managers write job descriptions. We launched close to 100 AI courses for free on LinkedIn with the goal of really empowering everybody to go and learn and really build their skill set. LinkedIn is almost a billion users. Does that mean you need to now think differently, especially while rolling out a new product in a large market like India? Cohen: In many ways, we have actually done multiple iterations in the past around how we localise a product for an area. Before we were one big global app and trying to bring it into markets where we found that you want to learn locally but then build it all the way to the global algorithm app. And that's the best way for you to scale because ultimately the power of LinkedIn is really connecting communities of professionals across the whole world. Now, every market is unique, every market goes through its own implications of how the job market is doing there. In India, given how the talent market drives like a flourishing economy, there's a desire to learn more skills, and rescaling and upskilling is a massive trend in India right now that LinkedIn is tapping into. And it is phenomenal for us to take the global product, but make sure it works seamlessly and beautifully within a local market. Now take into account the sheer diversity of languages in India and you can imagine what does it mean for us to really customise the product to every language? That would be incredible, it empowers everybody.
