LinkedIn has launched Service Marketplace, a new front in the job market for freelancers. The new feature, which has been in the pipeline for long, will let people advertise themselves for short-term engagements to those looking to hire people for such roles.
It is a major shift since the Microsoft-owned platform closed down in China. The new feature shares similarities with the likes of Fiverr and Upwork, skills and knowledge outsourcing platforms.
Per TechCrunch, Service Marketplace was first leaked out as a small test in February this year. Since then, LinkedIn has been running a quiet beta of the service in the U.S., which has already picked up 2 million users from among the nearly 800 million users (as of Wednesday’s earnings report) that LinkedIn now has globally.
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The feature has gone live globally: to set up a freelancer profile, you go to your own profile page, find the button near the top and follow the script to set it up and flag what you might be interested in working on.
LinkedIn aims to use the new feature to expand its recruitment services. The company said in Wednesday’s earnings call, per TechCrunch, that confirmed hires on the platform increased more than 160% year over year, with advertising revenue overall up 61% in the same period. It is managing to upsell those doing recruiting to its wider suite of training content, too: LinkedIn Learning now has more than 15,000 enterprise customers.
Product manager Matt Faustman told TechCrunch in an interview that the Service Marketplace is launching with 250 job categories, and the plan is to expand that to 500. He thus explained how the feature will work.
“We are barely scratching the surface,” he said. Marketing has been one of the stronger categories to date on the marketplace, he added.
“Barely scratching the surface” may be the operative phrase here.
For now, there is no way of negotiating a fee for work, nor for invoicing, and those looking to find people are not required to give any specific guidance on fees until they get into a deeper conversation with a candidate.
When it comes to reviews, clients can review those they have engaged, but the individuals cannot leave a reciprocal review for the clients.
And, those listing their profiles on the Marketplace have no way of finding jobs themselves: they are there to be discovered, not to search for work.
Clients looking to fill jobs will be able to look for people by way of LinkedIn’s bigger drop-down search menu: for example, looking for specialists in brand marketing, you can start to type in that phrase in the search window, and LinkedIn will suggest “in Service Marketplace” as an auto-complete, which will take you to a list of candidates in that category.
In turn, those candidates will be sorted based on how closely you the client might be connected to each individual, either via a work or personal connection.
But again, those who are brand marketing specialists, as one example, will not be able to scan a wider list of opportunities. Faustman said that all the current limitations are intentional: they have, for now, built this for the client experience, and the idea is that by letting them make targeted tasks, they do not get inundated with applications that they then have to spend time triaging.
Over time this, plus all of the other features that are missing such as payments, will be re-evaluated, he said.
That will be critical if LinkedIn hopes to get the credibility of the workforce that it’s trying to cultivate here. Freelancers often suffer from a lack of transparency on rates, and run the risk of being exploited as a result through low-balling, a point Faustman acknowledged is an issue and said was a point of contention within LinkedIn’s product team.
“We will address the pricing point, but we decided not to for now,” he said.
Another interesting turn will be how and if LinkedIn will bring in other kinds of workers into the marketplace, covering the wider population of people who are working on the front line and other service jobs. There is no immediate roadmap to include them in the Service Marketplace, Faustman said, but “the long term is that we can extend this into any category that exists on LinkedIn.”