LinkedIn’s out to further help its members better manage their LinkedIn inbox by filtering out more junk via a new ‘Focused Inbox’ UI, which will essentially re-route less valuable messages into an ‘Other’ tab in your LinkedIn message stream. LinkedIn’s Focused Inbox update now provides you with two separate InMail tabs – ‘Focused’ and ‘Other’. However, the ‘Other’ could just as easily be called ‘Spam’, which will be interesting to see where LinkedIn’s Sponsored InMails end up in this separation.
Focus Now
Given how a lot of emails that fall into any sort of ‘Other’ filter category are junk anyway, it’s safe to guess that LinkedIn won’t simply shift them to the ‘You Can Ignore These Messages’ section, especially if brands are paying to promote them.
“[The Focused Inbox] is an intelligent, dual-tabbed display that makes it easier to find and respond to the messages that matter most by categorizing incoming messages into two tabs. Your most relevant messages will appear on the Focused tab while the rest remain easily accessible on the Other tab. You can also easily move messages between the tabs.”
LinkedIn also notes that, over time, your inbox does become smarter, based on how you use it, essentially learning what you classify as junk and also filtering accordingly. It’ll be interesting to see how LinkedIn’s categorization process works, which will dictate the ultimate effectiveness of this approach, while it’s also good to see LinkedIn utilize more machine learning tools to better personalize the user experience.
This might not have a huge impact, but then again, for people who do get a lot of LinkedIn messages, it could be a great way to reduce the time needed to manage requests of potential value, versus random cold pitches in the app.
LinkedIn’s also looking to better help people find existing opportunities within the company they’re currently working for, with a dedicated ‘Jobs at your company’ element in the Jobs tab will showcase newly listed roles within your organization. Ideally, this will help close the gap that often exists in larger organizations where people often miss out on internal promotions because they were unaware that such opportunities existed.
LinkedIn’s also adding new ways to showcase your soft skills, via written or video responses to common hiring questions that you can share on your profile, while it’s also expanding its investment into machine-translated captions in different languages to provide broader access to LinkedIn Learning courses.
LinkedIn has also added some new analytics elements to its Sales Navigator pro platform, including a new account dashboard that displays a listing of saved accounts and their relative level of interest, based on AI-determined signals. LinkedIn says that this is the first of many new analytics features to come to Sales Navigator.
The Wrap
It’ll be interesting to see how accurate these lead indicators are, though you think with the number of professional conversations the app plays host to, LinkedIn should at least have a formula by now to determine interest for active members and businesses. It’s good to finally see LinkedIn better make use of machine learning to tap into its unmatched database of professional insights, potentially propelling itself to become a more critical companion for all HR and business professionals.
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