LinkedIn and LinekdIn Lite User Segments
LinkedIn User Segments
LinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. Your linked profile basically represents a summary of your career and professional interests. LinkedIn also has a Learning platform where users can take courses to up-skill themselves.
LinkedIn's user segment can broadly be divided 4 personas:
Rohit
is a 22-year-old male from Delhi
Recently graduated as a software engineer
enjoys writing code and building apps on android and iOS. Is looking forward to starting his career in the tech world
Wants to use LinkedIn for himself to look for jobs and will be using it on his phone and desktop occasionally
Requirements
As a job seeker, Rohit wants a way to look at all job listings for his profile
He wants to be able to filter the listings based on his experience, salary expectation, and location of work
Rohit wants to be able to apply for a job and track the progress of all applications as well
As a job seeker, Rohit also wants to show his credibility in the skills he has learned
He wants to be able to see how are his peers doing at their job and also wants to share with his peers his learning experiences from work
Ria
is a 26-year-old female based out of Bangalore
Recruiter at top Software Company. Looking to hire for various different roles at the company she's working at
She has been a recruiter for the last 4 years, has great experience and expertise in her field
Wants to make her job as a recruiter more efficient and is dissatisfied with the pace at which hiring is going
Another pain-point is cost - Due to the stretched timeline in hiring, more time and resources are allocated to the process, leading to higher hiring cost
Requirements
wants to be able to track the status of all applicants more efficiently
Filter out candidates based on the skills required by the company
Filter out applicants based on the job profile
Wants to be able to identify candidates who may not be experts at the moment but are super talented and doing some good work
John
is a 28-year-old male based out of Mumbai
Sales Head at B2B Software MNC
Has close to 8 years of experience working in sales - knows the ins and outs of selling a software product
John is slowly starting to realize he and his team are not being able to meet targets in some quarters and would want to address that
Finding clients through the old ways like email is not getting them very far and he wants to try something new to change this
Requirements
Wants to be able to reach out to Business Owners/Product representatives at the other companies which might be prospective clients
Wants to be able to organize leads in one place and be able to track/follow up with them
Discover new leads who may be interested in signing up for their product
Rahul
is a 25-year-old male based out of Hyderabad
part of the marketing team at an up and coming startup in the B2C space
Rahul has had a varied experience so far in his career, having worked in IT, sales, and marketing. Generalist mindset who wants to learn all aspects of how a business works
Currently not happy with work and looking for a change
Rahul also feels lost in terms of his career and some guidance would be of help
Requirements
Wants a mentor - someone who can look up to for career advice
Rahul would love to be able to share his insights and experiences with his professional network to help them grow and also wants to learn from others' experiences
wants to learn new skills which are in demand by current companies
Brownie Point Features
Recruiter Dashboard - LinkedIn has built a dashboard for subscribers of the LinkedIn Recruiter subscription - making their job as recruiters faster and more efficient
Sales Dashboard - LinkedIn Premium for Sales operators also has a special platform to keep track of all leads and other features to help make the sales process smoother
Mentor Program - Not sure if it's still active, but a couple of years back LinkedIn started the Mentor program where every week you would get suggestions of people are from your field or fit the criteria you select at the beginning of the program. These individuals have signed up to be mentors and help young career professionals grow!
LinkedIn Lite Personas and Pain Points
LinkedIn Lite is a stripped-down version of the LinkedIn app with only the essential features.
Why would someone want a LinkedIn Lite? Who would be an ideal user for this? Let's dive deeper!
Ideal Persona
Rachna is a 21-year-old from a small town called Asansol in West Bengal
She recently graduated with a Bcom degree and is now looking for a job
Got good grades in college and also teaches school students on the side
She is really dedicated and is determined to get a job in a top company in the Business Development/Business Analyst role
While she is dedicated, she is limited by not having a personal laptop and her job search will mostly be done on her smartphone with occasional access to a desktop
Asansol doesn't have a lot of job opportunities for the kind of role and the career she wants. She wants to go work in a bigger city like Kolkata
Pain Points
Lack of Opportunity
A lot of the students graduating from tier 2, tier 3 cities and towns find it difficult to find the job opportunities that justify the cost of their education, and moving to bigger cities also leads to a better standard of living.
This leads to the pain of having to move to a metro city to look for jobs from there and give interviews leading to an overhead of costs even before you've started earning
Financial Pain Points
A large part of the population coming from these tier 2, tier 3 cities form the middle-class and lower-middle-class of our nation. Desktops and expensive smartphones are a luxury that not many can afford
A smartphone with limited storage is what most have access to
Limited Connectivity
Another major pain point in these parts of the country is limited internet connectivity
Connectivity in a lot of these parts is limited to 2g and 3g
While the pain points we looked at are with respect to India, most other developing nations also face similar issues.
How does LinkedIn Lite solve this?
Has all the essential features of LinkedIn - Creating a profile, adding work details, adding people to your network, messaging, posting content, apply for jobs
The size of the LinkedIn Lite app is less than 5MB which really less compared to the ~40MB LinkedIn app
LinkedIn Lite app is designed in such a way that it works at lower internet speeds like 2g and 3g where has the normal app would face issues loading up
LinkedIn Lite gives users belonging to remote places, not only India but other developing nations to be able to benefit from the product. So even someone with only a smartphone with limited storage and limited connectivity can now apply to jobs in any part of the world from the comfort of their home!