LinkedIn strengthens India operations

Professional networking website LinkedIn is looking at the Indian market in a more focused manner following the appointment of its country manager Hari V Krishnan (pictured, right) last month. The company presently has a three member India team, based out of its newly set up office at Bandra Kurla Complex in Mumbai.

The latest to join the team is Nayan Patel who has taken the role of director of operations for LinkedIn in India. Until recently, Patel served as director of strategic partnerships for LinkedIn at Mountain View, California. He has earlier worked with Google, IBM and Yahoo!, both in India and the US.

Arvind Rajan (pictured, left), vice president, (International) at LinkedIn said that the company has been witnessing “hockey-stick growth” in its India user base over the past one year. "Some of us from LinkedIn came down to India in September to engage with groups of employers, did several roundtables and discussions with the user community here and discovered that this (India) indeed would be our next growth market.”

"We’ve already begun driving revenues out of India. We have about 3.4 million members from this country and that has happened purely through word-of-mouth and very little marketing efforts from our side. We now want to spur that growth through initiatives from our team here."

Said Krishnan, "We now plan to drive brand awareness in India through strategic partnerships with media organisations and other distribution channels. Our marketing efforts will focus on education campaigns to drive user engagement, collaboration, communications and business intelligence tools as well as adoption of our open platform by third party developers."

"What’s interesting is that our user base in India has already formed 30,000 groups on LinkedIn, which means more and more professional conversations are happening on the site. So they're going there for sales ideas, to drive business development leads, to get professional information and of course to find jobs and hire people," Krishnan said.

Rajan said that some of the features which have become popular on LinkedIn are Search, People You May Know and InMail. From India specifically, companies in the technology space, telecom and IT and financial services have begun using LinkedIn for recruitment.

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