LinkedIn India witnessed net increase of 700% in last 5 years: Country Manager Nishant Rao

LinkedIn, the professional networking platform that lets one create professional profiles, network with prospective employers and find jobs, has long overtaken other job portals with the sheer magnitude of available talentpool, number of brands jumping into the bandwagon and the user-friendly interface that it offers. India is LinkedIn's second largest market and has shown tremendous growth in the past five-six years. dna caught up with LinkedIn's Country Manager Nishant K Rao over the platform's future strategy for growth in India, tie-ups and why the student base is the fastest growing segment for the platform. 

Excerpts from the interview: 

Does LinkedIn India have any tie-up with universities or take part in career-fairs to recruit students?

Students are an important set for us as they are the early professionals who use LinkedIn. We have over 40 million students on LinkedIn and they are the fastest growing demographic on our platform. LinkedIn does tie-up with universities across India. For example, we have a strategic partnership with AIESEC and to help reach and educate students at most major colleges in India. Additionally, we also have products focused at universities (eg. IIM-A university page) and features like the alumni tool, thereby making the job easier for career development centers or students looking for mentors. 

Our recent study shows that more than a third of students and early professionals with less than a year of experience take one to three months to land their first job. In this case, we want to be the indispensable platform for students, helping them get their first steps towards building a professional brand right and making more informed career choices. From the time they pick up their first college brochure, till the time they complete their studies and shift their focus to getting their first job, we believe that as a professional platform, we can help them grow and establish an identity, network and knowledge to make them successful. 

Recruiters are also making use of Check-In, our mobile application that simplifies management of information at large career fairs. Overall, we believe that by leveraging LinkedIn as a collaboration platform, the ecosystem of universities, companies and students can function more efficiently and enable better matching of talent with opportunity.

What is your current traffic in India? How has the growth been?

We started off with 3.4 million members in late 2009/early 2010 and today we are over 28+ million members in India, a net increase of 700% over the last few years. The growth has been incredible and it’s great to see not just the number of members grow, but also the usage of different properties across our site (by the same user). India has the second-largest member base (after the US) for LinkedIn globally, making this a very strategically important market for LinkedIn. 

What are the growth expectations from the platform?

Growth for us is not just about growing our member base, but about enabling our members to grow themselves. Over the last several years, LinkedIn has established itself as the pre-eminent professional network with 332+ million members, which means that more than half of all professionals worldwide are already using our platform. Our aim is to drive relevance and right opportunity, whether it is business or career. It is exciting to see the multiple ways in which professionals in India continue to leverage LinkedIn and the value they get. This has lead to us adding more than 2 new members every second. 

How has LinkedIn's mobile growth been? 

Mobile is LinkedIn’s fastest growing service platform. Almost half of our traffic comes through mobile phones. In the third quarter of 2014, mobile accounted for 47 percent of unique visiting members to LinkedIn. Mobile usage in India is also growing very rapidly, as more and more platforms get supported. LinkedIn is now available on iOS, Android and BlackBerry and Nokia Asha.

During the recent Lok Sabha elections, social media sites like Facebook, Twitter as well as Google came up with reports, apps etc to be part a part of the debate. Why was LinkedIn not part of the race? 

For LinkedIn it’s all about context. Our platform is streamlined around professional conversations and opinions rather than being a platform for expressing personal preferences. 

What is your personal favorite LinkedIn feature? 

I really like LinkedIn Pulse, where our pool of over 500 world leaders share their views on business, politics and leadership. This unique feature connects you with powerful thought leaders from across the globe. In India, it’s great to see influencers like Narendra Modi talk about his commitment to Make In India or Swati Piramal reflect on her way of working or Kiran Mazumdar share her thoughts on how India needs to embrace startups more willingly.

Have Indian users understood the full relevance of LinkedIn yet? 

It has been great to see LinkedIn’s continued success on the consumer front. Through professional networking and interacting with mentors, our members are building and enhancing their professional journey. In the spirit of continuous improvement, we are always looking for opportunities to educate and explain the different features of LinkedIn. 

In fact we are proud of several case examples where members have benefited greatly from the platform. For example, Deepak Srinath and Uday Disley of Viedea Capital Advisors were able to secure funding for their business by connecting with and engaging VCs over LinkedIn. Another example is how Purvish Diwanji of Satyajit Chemicals was able to broaden his customer base in Africa by leveraging our platform.

Does LinkedIn provide any form of competition to job portals? 

LinkedIn by design is a professional network and our aim is to connect the world’s professionals and make them more productive. We help our members find relevant opportunities. So, jobs are a core part of the overall offering. The beauty is that we have flipped the process on its head – rather than quantity based processes where someone has to go and search for jobs they care about, at LinkedIn, relevant jobs automatically surface to the right members based on his/her profile, experience, expertise and geography. And that’s why we can connect talent with opportunity at a scale which no one else can. 

With our focus being on quality hires, we are also working with our customers to be more proactive and not focus their efforts on quantity or skimming through thousands of resumes. Rather, they should be able to spend the same time on just the few quality candidates that are a good match for the skills required to succeed in the role. Ultimately, with solutions and tools such as Check In, Connected and Recruiter, we provide holistic talent management solutions which are much harder for classified job models to incorporate. 

What is the strategy of the paid subscription model for LinkedIn? Has this picked up in India? 

We believe in making the free product very effective. Our ‘premium subscriptions’ are only targeted at a subset of members looking to solve specific use-cases (eg. job seekers, business development). Globally, talent solutions make up about 55-60 percent of our revenues while marketing solutions account for 20 percent and premium subscriptions 20 percent. Yet, at present, this last piece is not a conscious focus area for us in India. I would first like people to fully experience the platform and understand it before we start monetising it. 

How are brands and companies using LinkedIn to promote themselves? 

Today, brands in India as well as globally are actively engaging with LinkedIn to make a powerful presence for their brand. With the portfolio of products that we have, we can help companies on several different fronts - employer branding, building awareness among targeted audiences and having tailored and relevant two-way conversations with these audiences with our API solutions. 

For instance, Microsoft wanted to create a targeted and comprehensive format to drive better engagement metrics with IT decision makers using content marketing. With the help of our marketing solutions portfolio, Microsoft’s Brand Familiarity score grew 68% and its likelihood to purchase went up by 43%. 

Additionally, Van Heusen wanted to engage with a younger audience and consequently prioritised the digital and social media channels as a means to make a branding foray. We proposed the “Most Fashionable Professional” microsite, a platform where users could login with their LinkedIn credentials and offered advice on corporate dressing. In the month-long campaign, Van Heusen achieved a total reach of over 1.5 million LinkedIn users. The site saw 30,000 unique visitors of which 5,000 professionals logged in with their LinkedIn profile and nominated 15,000 connections across India.

Which sector or professionals use LinkedIn the most? 

Our member base is broad and wide. While IT and finance may typically be associated with early adoption of technology, we see ample representation from other sectors as well. For example, Pharmaceuticals, Telecommunications & Computer Software. Similarly, we have also seen an expansion from a geographic standpoint beyond the metros to also include Tier 2 and 3 cities. Finally, it’s great to see all these varied users explore and utilise different parts of our site.