FT: LinkedIn Seeks To Embrace Blue-Collar Workers

According to a recent report in the Financial Times, LinkedIn is looking to shed its elitist image as an exclusive club for professional knowledge workers. Andrew Hill’s article traces LinkedIn’s strategy back to their acquisition of Bright last year – a website that uses a scoring mechanism to match job-hunters with potential employers. The site had a more significant grounding with blue-collar workers – not the traditional demographic of LinkedIn members.

The article quotes LinkedIn co-founder Allen Blue as wanting to more actively target blue-collar workers in order to provide an ‘economic graph’. Jeff Weiner, LinkedIn’s CEO describes this ambition by saying: “We want to digitally map the global economy, identify the connections between people, jobs, skills, companies and professional knowledge – and spot in real-time the trends pointing to economic opportunities.” Hill’s article also notes that this strategy represents a pattern in tech companies’ development, where they start by targeting a more affluent community that is more lucrative before widening the scope of the product to explore growth.

This represents an interesting broadening of focus for LinkedIn. With many commentators pointing to the social media site as a competitive force to the executive search community, it can be argued that this makes a better case for the difference in audience and purpose between LinkedIn and executive search firms.

To read the full Financial Times article (paywall) click here.