LinkedIn has made its most ambitious move in India yet: placements. With the launch of LinkedIn placements, the company on Monday entered a space where companies like Naukri and Monster have reigned supreme for many years.
“Today is just the beginning. Our goal is to enable every college student in India to get any job they want to regardless of which college they went to,” said Akshay Kothari, Head of LinkedIn India.
To throw its weight behind the launch, this year the company won’t go to campuses to hire fresh graduates. “All our campus placements will happen through LinkedIn placements,” said Kothari who is currently looking to beef up LinkedIn’s Indian operations.
Nearly 16 lakh engineers graduate from Indian colleges every year and the tech industry hires about 2 lakh of them. LinkedIn’s launch also comes right in time for the campus placement tests, which usually begins around September in India.
In smaller cities, campus recruitment drives are a big deal. Thousands of students, especially from engineering colleges, take these tests conducted by placement agencies just to be shortlisted for a job interview.
Students can now log-in to LinkedIn placements and take an online test to be eligible for thousands of jobs, mostly in technology companies. LinkedIn, which piloted placements in November last year, has partnered with HackerRank, Aspiring Minds, Wheebox and CoCubes to enable the placements.
Jobs from over 35 top corporates are available through the test, said the company. This includes Tech Mahindra, HCL and Samsung among others.
LinkedIn’s chief executive officer Jeff Weiner described the product as an ‘ecosystem play’ which the company might take to other markets. For the company, which was recently acquired by Microsoft for $26.3 bn, this is one of the first ‘by India for India’ product. The company also announced LinkedIn lite, a lighter mobile version of the site for Indian users low on bandwidth as well as a starter pack for small and medium businesses.
Under newly appointed Kothari, the company is moving into a new phase in India, as it starts developing products for the world. “We are going to continue to see India pushing for LinkedIn in very similar areas starting with enabling economic activities, the placement ecosystem. There’s a lot for the world to learn,” said Weiner. This is against the current trend where many major multi-nationals operating in India like Google have moved core product development efforts closer to their headquarters in the past.
Lead Image: LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner in Bengaluru. Photo by: Jayadevan PK/ FactorDaily
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Disclosure: FactorDaily is owned by SourceCode Media, which counts Accel Partners, Blume Ventures and Vijay Shekhar Sharma among its investors. Accel Partners is an early investor in Flipkart. Vijay Shekhar Sharma is the founder of Paytm. None of FactorDaily’s investors have any influence on its reporting about India’s technology and startup ecosystem.
