PLBsearch: Growing with Linkedin

Case Analysis
Group No. 2
Section A
Group Members:
1. Abhishek Kumar (2015PGP006)
2. Aditya Anand (2015PGP013)
3. Marshall Goldsmith (2015PGP198)
4. Prerna Tomar (2015PGP284)
5. Ravi Prakash Gaur (2015PGP304)
6. S. Pranav Kumar (2012IPM090)
7. Sheshadri Bhattacharya (2012IPM098)
8. Subhash Kumar (2015PGP378)

Situation Analysis (5Cs)

Company: LinkedIn established itself as a place for professional

networking. It offered various solutions to help recruiters and job
seekers to meet at a common platform.
Collaborators: The collaborators are recruiters, search professionals
and users who have their profiles on LinkedIn.
Customers: The recruiters, advertisers and premium subscribers.
Most of the customers are B2B in nature
Competitors: It has competition from small boutique placement firms,
other online job portals
Context: LinkedIn was criticized for inappropriate use of profile data. It
made a series of strategic moves during 2012 and 2013 by acquiring
SlideShare and Pulse. It worked hard to enhance its mobile capability
Decision Problem
LinkedIn needed to discover opportunities to upgrade search professionals
such as Binner if they didnt need enterprise solution. Small boutique firms
are using LinkedIn only for searching candidates. Due to their limited use of
LinkedIn they dont need enterprise solutions. How can LinkedIn improve its
solutions to prompt boutique firms or search professionals to switch to
enterprise solutions?
Alternatives

Replace the in-house software so many search firms used to track

progress of candidates and keep in long-term touch with leads
 Do not change user interface very frequently
Find out new ways to engage B2B clients other than InMails

Framework for Evaluating Alternatives

To evaluate the alternatives following factors should be considered:

Increase in revenue
Cost incurred to implement changes
Increase in B2B customers
Increase in subscription of enterprise solutions
All these factors should be given a weight according to priority, e.g. Increase
in revenue is the most important factor so provide it a higher weight. Next,
we provide scores to each factor and calculate cumulative weighted scores.
The alternative which provides highest score should be chosen.
Recommendation and Action Plan
LinkedIn should adopt the change in engagement strategy with its clients.
Enterprise solution is not needed by PLBsearch. It should not push this to
boutique firms. A new solution catering to their needs can be introduced.
Binner is skeptical about the privacy and security of the data. Enhanced
security features should be implemented and for the problem of privacy, a
regular update to the candidates should be sent before taking any action. It
will help candidates to have more control over their information.
Case Questions
1. Does anything surprise you about LinkedIns revenue model?

Marketing solutions generated 23% of the revenues. It has 200 million

user profiles. How come LinkedIn did not invest much in increasing
marketing revenues despite a huge user base? This user base can help
LinkedIn to significantly increase its revenues.
For every hour a user spent on Facebook, that site grossed 6.2 cents.
LinkedIn grossed $1.30 in that same hour. The revenue is generated for
the How did LinkedIn generate this revenue?
2. Which activities on the LinkedIn website are most important to LinkedIns
model?

Search of profiles of candidates by recruiters

Maintain privacy and security of data of users
Engagement of its users or time spent by users on LinkedIn
 Marketing solutions
Provide good user experience
Proper match of profile of candidate and requirements of the recruiters
3. How could LinkedIn maximize its relationship with PLBsearch?
PLBsearch is primarily a small firm engaged in search of profiles on LinkedIn.
PLBsearch is aiming to achieve following two objectives:

Advertising the small firm on LinkedIn to attract more customers

Identification of passive job seekers
To maximize these objectives for PLBsearch, LinkedIn can adopt following
ways:

Ensure privacy of the candidate. Binner is skeptical if she is violating

privacy rules. LinkedIn can provide suggestions to Binner for privacy
rules whenever she is using data.
Provide analytics solutions to the search activities of PLBsearch which
will ensure better usage of LinkedIn
Promote PLBsearch to candidates and other job portals. This will help
Binner in marketing PLBsearch and increase visibility of the firm. Both
the companies should work in collaboration to achieve better mutual
results.
4. What are the greatest strategic risks to LinkedIn today?

Increasing usage of internet on mobile has made it imperative for

LinkedIn to enhance its mobile capacity. The continuously changing
landscape of user experience keeps LinkedIn always at its toes to serve
its customers.
Abundance of information of a user on LinkedIn makes it susceptible to
several security risks. Cyber-attacks are becoming more and more
advanced day by day. LinkedIn needs to strengthen its security
mechanism.
LinkedIn may convert into a pure search website only. Bigger firms are
outsourcing their recruitment activity to boutique firms. These firms
have search professionals who do not use enterprise solutions of
LinkedIn. This trend if grows may further dilute the revenues generated
by enterprise solutions.