How would you improve LinkedIn? [Microsoft Product Management Interview]

 

Photo by Souvik Banerjee on Unsplash

Interviewer: How would you improve LinkedIn?

Shailesh: Alright, before answering this question, I would like to clarify my understanding of LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a professional social networking website. It has several verticals like networking, Newsfeed, Job search, LinkedIn Learning etc. LinkedIn is operating on the freemium business model. Is this correct, or do you want to add some more things? 
Interviewer: Yes, this is correct.

Shailesh: Okay, now talking about the improvement of LinkedIn, improvement can be of different types like improvement in the acquisition of new users, engagement of users or it can be related to monetisation. Since LinkedIn is in a growing phase, it would be good to focus on improving the engagement part. What do you think? 
Interviewer: Engagement sounds good; please ease go ahead.

Shailesh: Do we have any resource or time constraints that I should be aware of? I am asking this because this might play a role in prioritising the product roadmap.
Interviewer: Yes, you may assume that we have to release the first cut of the improvement in 3 months.

Shailesh: Okay, sure, the way I would like to approach is, first will see different customer segment and their user journey. With the help of that, we can see their pain points; we will try to think of solutions for the pain points. We will also see the metrics to track whether our solution is working fine. At last, we can think of the future of the features or some tradeoff if we have. Sounds okay?
Interviewer: Sounds great, go ahead.

User Personas

Shailesh: These can be the different customer segments I can think of.

1. A job seeker who is actively looking for a job or job switch.
2. Job recruiter/HR who posts jobs on the platform
3. A content consumer who silently consumes content.
4. A content producer who posts content a lot.
5. Someone interested in building his network and sends requests, check out other profiles etc.
6. Advertisers who want to do some sort of promotion of their organisation

These are the broad personas. Do you want me to focus on a specific persona?

Interviewer: I would like you to focus on the “job” vertical on LinkedIn.

User Journey

Shailesh: Alright, talking about the job vertical, I would like to focus on job seeker. Let’s see their user journey so that we can think of their pain points. The broad user journey of any job seeker would look like this.

1. Search for the job according to some preference
2. Apply to the job with a resume and wait for the communication from the HR
3. Prepare for the interview, if shortlisted
4. Wait for the results
5. Improve on the feedback if not selected. If selected, then focus on onboarding and document verification.

Pain Points

Let’s see what the different pain points for the job seekers are:

1. As a job seeker, I find it hard to comprehend the job requirement and even more difficult to assess the culture from the job description.
2. As a job seeker, I find it painful to be unaware of the status of my application, and this becomes even worse when my application gets rejected at any stage, and I am not aware of the same.
3. Even if I get shortlisted, I need to connect with different people working in the same company through LinkedIn to have some guidance about the interview preparation.
4. When my application gets rejected, I am not able to get proper feedback about how can I improve in future.
5. As a job seeker, I need to take care of different communication channels like Zoom for a video interview, Gmail for tracking mail and LinkedIn for application.
6. Even though I have an updated LinkedIn profile, I need to go through the entire background screening process again.

Solutions/Features

Now let’s see some of the solutions for the same problems

1. LinkedIn can have video Job Description, which will give a small glimpse of the requirements in the role, the company’s cultures and values. Video has a longer-lasting effect than the textual Job description.
2. LinkedIn can have a proper Recruitment funnel which will be updated by the person who has posted the job. The funnel will have different stages like resume submission, shortlist for telephonic interview, shortlist for an onsite interview, job offer etc. The candidate can track the status of the application, and it will reduce anxiety.
3. There should be a feature that will tell how likely you will get a shortlist if you apply to that job using AI.
4. After applying for the job, LinkedIn should smartly recommend the sample question that is likely to be asked in the interview. The AI engine should automatically tell the resources available on LinkedIn Learning that can help to ace the interview.
5. LinkedIn can have something like “Guidance over a coffee”, where the industry experts can hold the sessions in their respective fields about career and interview guidance.
6. If my profile gets rejected, LinkedIn can provide a summary of why my profile got rejected and at what stage it was rejected. LinkedIn should also give me a summary of all those profiles which got shortlisted for the further round, which will help me assess and improve.
7. LinkedIn can be the standalone integrated channel for all the communication, like email, interviews and offer confirmation. E2e
8. LinkedIn can also leverage VR technology to have a conversation with the candidate, so that it feels like a live conversation.

Prioritisation

Keeping in mind that we need to deliver the first cut of the solution in 3 months, I would like to have the following recommendation for prioritising the solution.

Must have: #2, #1

Should have: #3, #4, #6

Could have — #7, #5

Wouldn’t have — #8

Success Metrics

Now let’s see the success metrics for the solutions

1. Number of visits to application tracking window per day
2. The average number of job description videos watched by a user
3. An average number of times a user replays a job description video.
4. The ratio of the number of people who got shortlisted to the number of people who applied and having a cutoff score of above a certain threshold recommended by the AI engine.
5. Average time spent by a user on the recommended material(LinkedIn Learning) for interview preparation.

Interviewer: Thank You

-TechnoManagers