TechCrunch - Wednesday, June 6, 2018 at 9:12 AM
LinkedIn debuts Your Commute, navigation and maps to size up jobs based on how
far they are
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LinkedIn, the social media site for people looking to network or otherwise
change up their career prospects, is taking a plunge into location-based
services. From today, the company is turning on a new feature that will let
job-seekers check out the location and commute time to specific businesses, to
help them evaluate whether they would want to work there.
‘Your Commute’ as the feature is called, is now available globally on mobile
for all businesses where LinkedIn already has location information, and it will
be coming soon to desktop, senior product manager Dan Li told TechCrunch.
He said the feature will appear within job postings on LinkedIn and will become
a part of how LinkedIn surfaces job opportunities in its search feature. “When
members save their location preferences in Career
Interests<https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/career-interests/>, we’re able to
provide more relevant job recommendations that fit exactly what they’re looking
for in their next role,” he said. “We’re thinking through additional ways
members can use location information to improve their job searches in the near
future.”
For now, he said that the distance feature isn’t being used in other parts of
the LinkedIn platform, but you can imagine where it might pop up next: for
example, when two contacts are arranging an in-person meeting over messages,
LinkedIn’s AI ‘bot’ — which is already being used to suggest conversation
openers<http://techcrunch.com/2017/10/24/linkedin-boosts-its-messaging-with-smart-replies-pre-written-ai-based-interactions/>
— could suggest locations to meet that are mutually convenient for the two
parties.
LinkedIn, which was acquired by
Microsoft<https://techcrunch.com/2016/06/13/microsoft-to-buy-linkedin-for-26b-in-cash-makes-big-move-into-enterprise-social-media/>
for $26.2 billion in 2016, has been slowly
cross-pollenating<https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/31/microsoft-rolls-out-linkedin-integrations-in-outlook-com/>
features and services with its new owner, and this is the case here. The
location and navigation data is being supplied by Bing Maps, Microsoft’s
mapping service that is akin to Google and Apple Maps, by way of its API.
Using it in LinkedIn will give Bing one more extension into more traffic and
data collection to help expand the maps’ datasets; and it gives LinkedIn one
more hook to keep people engaged in and using their service, both to expand the
usefulness of LinkedIn itself, as well as to give its job listings one more
edge over other competing job boards.
You can get an initial list of details about a company’s location through
LinkedIn itself — helping with the app’s own engagement — but LinkedIn, hoping
to make this as useful as possible, will also allow users to dive in deeper and
open the navigation up in other maps.
While LinkedIn has sometimes been taken to task for how it suggests connections
to users — particularly in cases where it isn’t even clear how LinkedIn has
gleaning is social graph information in the first place — Li said that the
addition of this feature came straight from user feedback.
“Our members have indicated that the location of a job — and the commute time
associated with it — is a big factor in their decision making process when
considering new roles, and we know commute times are getting longer across the
board according to recent research from Gallup,” he said. The company’s own
LinkedIn survey data indicated that 85 percent of professionals would take a
pay cut for a shorter commute. “The Your Commute feature is a quick and easy
way for members to access insight into their potential commute directly within
the job posting on LinkedIn and empower them to make more informed career
decisions.”
More generally, location has become a huge factor in how people choose jobs,
and for the less sexy companies out there based in far-flung suburbs that might
give them cheaper overheads, this has become a big issue for them in their own
search for talent. Some have even opted to lease spaces in WeWork offices or
other co-working venues that are in more central areas, as a way of attracting
top candidates.
The more complicated side of that has seen huge concentrations of people in
specific industries like the tech world, where remunerations are generous,
flocking and filling out cities across the Bay Area to be closer to their jobs,
leading to huge housing crunches. In a way, LinkedIn’s tool could make that
location drive even more acute in sectors where it’s already a problem.
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https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/06/linkedin-debuts-your-commute-navigation-and-maps-to-size-up-jobs-based-on-how-far-they-are/
David Goldfield
Assistive Technology Specialist
Feel free to visit my Web site
WWW.DavidGoldfield.info<http://WWW.DavidGoldfield.info>
