CIOIN

Interview Questions

Full Interview with Hari Krishnan

Hari Krishnan:

When LinkedIn entered India in December 2009, we had 3.4 million users in India. We saw good potential in the market, which is why we opened our first APAC office in India. We’ve seen a large number of Indian professionals take to the site and the result of this viral growth is that we now have over nine million professionals. The last year or so has been spent in understanding customers better and providing them with better solutions. Because of the nine million professionals, people are getting value out of the network. People have begun raising questions about using the product and services better as a corporate, a marketer, a recruiter, and a consumer.
We believe that we live in a talent economy, and LinkedIn fuels that economy. The difference between the winners and the bystanders will be the ability to attract, engage, and retain talent. If talent was a currency, we are the exchange. 

Hari Krishnan:

Innovation is a key part of our business, and it has been driven by IT. IT is a key enabler, and has been instrumental in helping us cope with the strong growth rate we’re seeing.  One of our greatest innovative initiatives has been the ‘Company Pages’ for business. This is a business’ official profile placed on a neutral platform so that millions of professionals can understand its products or services better.
Another example is one of the cornerstones of social media, a tool called ‘People You May Know’ that was invented by LinkedIn. Starting from there to contextual advertising—in which people see ads depending on their industry, function and seniority—LinkedIn has always used IT to innovate and find new ways of using information to add value to the network.

Hari Krishnan:

 We did a contextual-based marketing campaign for Volkswagen. This ensured that every professional saw a different ad based on their industry, function, and seniority. Another interesting new product we’ve launched is ‘Recommendations’. Research proves that recommendations are the purest form of advertising that people will trust. If someone in your network recommends one of these products or services, that recommendation will surface on your profile. For example, when Volkswagen was launching a range of cars across categories, and someone in your network recommended the car, the tool would tell you.
When a CIO uses the tool to recommend a product or service, it carries enormous weight because that CIO is linking his professional reputation to the recommendation. This is an excellent way for CIOs to position themselves as thought leaders.

Hari Krishnan:

Our enterprise customers consist of marketers and recruiters. The company pages on LinkedIn allow companies to not only talk about what positions are vacant but to also market their products and services.
Our tools also provide a lot of insight into what others are doing.  By using a tool such as ‘Follow’, users can track competition. It gives a company the ability to pick up trends. Journalists are using this in a very effective way. For example, a news daily once broke a story about how Apple was acquiring a new company—before the official announcement—because the journalist noticed that people from the acquired company were changing their LinkedIn profiles to reflect the change in their job status.
Also, we live in the age of data volumes and people are struggling to make sense of it all. Having a lot of data doesn't necessarily help in better decision making. LinkedIn is trying to fix that with a tool called Signal. It allows people to detect signals from the stream of data that's out there.
When I want to consume business news, how do I know what is more relevant? Sure, there are technologies like RSS feeds that filter news based on interest. But there are millions of articles in my field of interest. If I can overlay my trusted network of professionals and find out what they are reading, the results would probably be news that’s more relevant to me. Today, that’s what LinkedIn does: It brings out what our 100 million-strong network of professionals think is relevant. 

Hari Krishnan:

We do allow that but we’re very careful. We’re a professional network and lot of people use us as a productivity tool. People take their user experience on LinkedIn very seriously.
That’s why we keep a very high bar on which partners can develop apps. Having said that, we have open APIs and we encourage people to develop apps that can pull LinkedIn information, like a number of websites already do.

Hari Krishnan:

We are a professional network and we’re dedicated to connecting professionals and making them more successful and productive. I say that because although LinkedIn belongs to the realm of social media, we are much more than that. A number of large companies, for example, use us for employment and branding. Then, sales and marketing professionals also pay us a premium to discover new leads.
The demand for LinkedIn’s services is not coming from any specific department; it’s driven across the board. CIOs are beginning to understand that users are using us for a variety of reasons. LinkedIn is already integrated into many enterprise products; but CIOs play a critical role in enabling them.
For instance, LinkedIn is integrated into the latest versions of MS Outlook and IBM Lotus notes. CIOs can—not only push adoption of this new tool—but also monitor its use and share best practices between functions.

Hari Krishnan:

 While IT is a strong enabler of business functions, it is the implementation of IT that is critical. I really believe that what sets companies that are good apart from the companies that are average is the way they implement IT and how they use it. That makes the CIO an important business decision maker. Based on the way they chose to develop and implement technology, they can influence business productivity and success metrics overall.

Hari Krishnan:

That’s one of those things that depends on individual to individual and company to company. As an individual, I believe in early adoption but as a business leader I have to make the right decisions based on business realities. I feel early adoption across the board is not the best way to go. It really comes down to the circumstances of your company and industry.