HR 101: The history of LinkedIn

Welcome to HR 101. Class is now in session. Today’s discussion will focus on the history of LinkedIn.

The history. Reid Hoffman came up with the idea for a professional social network in 2002. The dotcom bubble had burst, and it was a time of career uncertainty for many, particularly in the tech industry. One year later, on May 5, 2003, Hoffman launched LinkedIn with co-founders Allen Blue, Konstantin Guericke, Eric Ly, and Jean-Luc Vaillant.

The platform ended its first month of operation with 4,500 members.

Two years later, LinkedIn introduced job posts, and in 2008, it launched LinkedIn Recruiter, its enterprise service designed to help HR professionals fill positions.

Throughout the 2010s, the platform continued to evolve, releasing tools like its skills endorsement feature, as well as apps for recruiters and job-seekers. The business also evolved, going public in 2011 before being acquired by Microsoft in 2016.

Fast-forward. Today, LinkedIn has over 1 billion active members in over 200 countries. Some 65 million job-seekers use the platform every week, and employers in over 230 countries use LinkedIn Talent Solutions to source and hire.

And it doesn’t appear to be slowing down. At LinkedIn’s Talent Connect summit in October 2023, the company announced new HR-specific tools, including a generative AI update to its Recruiter service.

And on March 6, LinkedIn launched new features meant to help HR better connect with employees about internal opportunities and design upskilling programs to help them reach their goals, HR Brew reported.

“What we’re aiming to solve is…break[ing] down the DNA of a role into a set of skills and give people an upskilling path aligned to those skills, making them agile to fit roles as they shift and evolve,” Jill Raines, LinkedIn’s director of product management and head of LinkedIn Learning, told HR Brew.