LinkedIn is looking to expand its Services Marketplace so as to facilitate more opportunities for freelancers. The marketplace itself is built upon its ‘Services’ listings for profiles and is specifically designed to enable more streamlined connection between brands and freelancers.
LinkedIn launched the Services Marketplace beta back in February of this year. Since then, it has grown to about 2 million users within the test pool. At present, LinkedIn is looking to finally expand the options worldwide, thus providing more opportunities for freelancers, facilitating better overall discovery and connection.
Tool Features
LinkedIn’s new additions benefit users that add a ‘Services’ listing to their profile by essentially augmenting their discovery capabilities. Users also get a suite of new widgets, including new recommendation tools, search filters, and more. All the additional updates are sure to help business owners determine exactly what it is that they would need from freelancers.
On top of that, LinkedIn is said to also be streamlining its freelancer connection process, thereby making it so that once potential clients discover your service page, they can immediately send service requests without needing to ‘connect’ or follow you. This is a significant improvement as it opens up freelance listings to a border audience, thus facilitating better connection.
LinkedIn is also adding in this new dashboard for service providers to help with inquiries:
“When you create a service page, you’ll now have a dashboard to manage project requests and messages all right from LinkedIn. No need to manage different communication channels. And, we’ll send you notifications if new requests or messages come in.”
Included with the new dashboard is a ‘Review Status’ element that allows users to manage the client reviews featured on their service pages. While it adds an extra layer of transparency, the opposite can also hold true in that such capability can also be used to virtually ‘mask’ or censor major client feedback.
This update is but one of many of LinkedIn’s new job connection features, which they have been heavily leaning on lately, that look to facilitate more flexibility in terms of work settings in job queries. New ‘Remote’, ‘Hybrid’, and ‘On-Site’ filters will appear on its Job Search and Open-To-Work features. LinkedIn also looks to add new company page summaries to aid job seekers in providing more insight into workforce policies, specifically those currently aligned with the latest COVID guidelines.
The Wrap
These new filters are sure to prove crucial for communication as businesses all over the world gradually shift back towards in-office setups, resulting from the easing of COVID restrictions. It’s important to understand what specific requirements different workplaces will require post-pandemic since the way work has been conducted has drastically changed within the last 2 years.
LinkedIn is clearly benefiting from helping build economic recovery. On one of their posts on their LinkedIn Engineering Blog, they report:
“Job transitions are up 50% year over year, and as more candidates are looking for new positions, we’re seeing a record-setting number of open jobs on LinkedIn. Remote jobs are also becoming more prevalent, with 1 in 8 U.S. jobs on LinkedIn now being remote, an increase over the previous ratio of 1 in 67 seen in March 2020.”
On that note, LinkedIn is moving in the right direction, given the magnitude of career change that’s currently happening. It only makes sense to tap into current shifts as that is a good way to maximize opportunity and connection.
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