Like several other websites at the moment, LinkedIn’s career-oriented networking platform has seen a significant boost in traffic as a result of people being told to work from home and stay indoors to stop the spread of Coronavirus overall, with a increase of 55% more conversational interaction between existing connections in recent weeks. Today, LinkedIn is implementing new initiatives explicitly around work openings, to exploit the interest in a way that is more directly beneficial during this health crisis.
In addition to this, LinkedIn is developing a board for “urgent work” to give these vacancies greater visibility of priority. People whose skills suit those required for these jobs can see the special listings highlighted when they visit LinkedIn’s work homepage. Those that sign up with appropriate skills for work alerts will in turn receive real-time job updates when they get released.
The volunteer ads often connect up with an expanded Recruitment for Good initiative to help bring in more people in both voluntary and paying positions to work with nonprofits. And recruiters will also have exclusive access to LinkedIn’s talent analytics tools for three months to find out where their (online) advertisements are best placed around hiring trends and more.
Also Read: Uber Offers 10 Million Free Rides and Deliveries For COVID-19-Affected Employees
The American Red Cross of Los Angeles, the Common Spirit Health network, Doctors on Request and New York Presbyterian Health are among the groups that have already signed up to use them.
In the midst of the Coronavirus pandemic, the latest programs underline the bigger pattern of how tech firms are trying to provide whatever assistance they may bring to the table.
(Others include Google, which attempts to assist with research, but also offers a landing page for official and local information, while both Facebook and Twitter attempt to stamp out fake news while ties to official aid organizations are being linked.)
Recruitment — which has historically become the main revenue source for LinkedIn (as part of Microsoft, it doesn’t publish financials consistently for its business lines) — has been in an unusual role throughout this.
Recruitment and its parallel, jobs, were, on the one hand, two of the key levers for combating this pandemic.
On the clinical front, hospitals and related medical agencies are struggling to keep up with the increase in demand for their services, leading to massive recruiting campaigns to bring in people with relevant expertise, often going straight to the ranks of those who may have left the profession and are now being asked to step in again.
For example, in the United Kingdom, about 4,500 doctors and nurses have so far replied to an open invitation to return to medical service (many would have gone on to other non-clinical or administrative positions in the NHS, or left the public sector, or the profession entirely, not only retired due to age), with a greater likelihood of returning. And this is on the clinical front alone. We are seeing a multitude of call-outs in other industries, such as telecommunications, to bring in AI experts and other fields to help develop software and hardware to slow down the spread of the virus, to mitigate some of the side effects, to detect it more easily and maybe even to cure it theoretically.
