How do you see the potential of professional networking in India?

LinkedIn has more than 5 million users today in India. Considering that the estimate of white collar professionals in India is somewhere between 40 to 80 million, taking the conservative figure we have around 10 to 15% of the white collar population today. There is a huge scope for growth. Since November 2009 we have almost doubled our number of users. We are optimistic of Indian professionals wanting to network professionally and our ability to service them. Our value proposition is attractive for all levels: developing one’s professional brand. People from across age groups are coming to LinkedIn for professional networking, business insights and also recruitment.

Can you elaborate on LinkedIn’s plans in the area of recruitment in India?

Hiring solutions services is the fastest growing revenue source for us. Our current focus for Indian users is primarily to educate them about our suite of offerings. We have formed a full time team in India for the recruitment services vertical, and we recently appointed a Head Recruitment Sales for India. The type of companies that will be interested in our hiring solutions will be recruiters from within companies, executive search firms, and recruitment agencies. Our suite of products in the hiring solutions platform will be able to cater to the specific needs of each company from employer branding, to job board, to search functionality and referral checks.

In India, the recruitment market is very fragmented. I think that for a period of time several mechanism of recruitment will co-exist. Companies will eventually be focusing on those recruitment solutions that can offer both efficiency and quality. Service providers that can deal with company’s requirement quicker, cheaper as well as ensuring quality of hire will survive.

To what extent have Indian employers accepted professional networking with prospective employees? How much of this trend is visible in actual practice?

Employers are increasingly seeing the benefit of tapping into the passive job seekers. Professionals come to LinkedIn for building their professional brand and to foster opportunities for career advancement. We have seen in our recent research that professionals who are not actively looking for jobs tend to be more honest about their profiles. Professionals might tend to exaggerate their qualification or job experience when they are actively looking for a job. LinkedIn provides the public forum to enhance transparency and trust in the information as the community concept itself regulates the accuracy of data to some extent.