LinkedIn shakes its new, improved moneymaker: Recruiter

SAN FRANCISCO — LinkedIn is throwing a splashy event this morning to talk about the revamp of Recruiter, its professional people-finder for HR folks — and, coincidentally, the company’s fastest-growing source of revenue.

The professional network service recently rolled out a new, expanded version of its search features, making it easier to drill down on specific companies, jobs, people, and even content. But the Talent Solutions Recruiter product is a whole different beast: a supercharged way for professional recruiters to track down and hire even the rarest of candidates, aka “passive talent,” aka people who aren’t actually looking for a new job right now.

HR folks can use the Recruiter platform to conduct highly filtered people searches over the entire LinkedIn network. It gives their InMail accounts professional-grade features. And it gives recruiters project management tools — folders, to-do lists, and so on.

Today, the company showed off a revamped, more consumer-friendly UI for Recruiter — something that’s more in line, design-wise, with other recent LinkedIn redesigns.

Notifications are easier to see. It has a feed for updates (responses to actions you’ve taken). From your homepage, you can see a snapshot of projects you’re working on and positions you’re trying to fill.

And it even has a drop-down menu called “People You May Want To Hire,” with recommendations built on LinkedIn’s network and discovery algorithm — people you wouldn’t normally find just through searching.

Here’s a sneak peek:

Parker Barille, LinkedIn’s product chief for Talent Solutions, said this morning at the product’s launch event that this cleaned-up version of the homepage reduces the number of widgets from 12 to just five. “It’s magic,” he said.

The rollout will start happening over the next week.

Talent Solutions VP Dan Shapero said that in spite of LinkedIn’s growth and the more than 20 million college students and recent graduates looking for jobs on the network, “The talent pool is small and will only get worse. The number of people out there that you can go for is shrinking. Competition is heating up in the world of talent acquisition … and [you] can’t pay enough.”

He called LinkedIn’s tools a playbook for better recruiting, saying that using data better and building better networking tools are key to doing better recruiting.

Today’s redesign for LinkedIn’s enterprise products brings those interfaces up to speed with the company’s redesigned mobile apps (including its drop-dead gorgeous iPad app), its functional new homepage, and the new LinkedIn profiles rolled out late last year.

Image credit: Jolie O’Dell/VentureBeat