Jan 15th 2014, 13:59, by Ingrid Lunden
LinkedIn, the social network for the working world, has gained a reputation as a place to go when you’re looking for a job, or a person to fill a vacant role. Now the company is expanding on that idea with the launch of a Volunteer Marketplace – a place people can go to post and look for unpaid positions. The site is live now, with openings ranging from asking for help with web development at nonprofits like Hire Our Heroes through to a request for a voluntary board member (with fundraising experience) at theUnited Way of San Luis Obispo.
Launching a volunteer marketplace makes sense on a few levels for LinkedIn:
– It is currently courting more students to sign up, with an expansion of its university pages and now the ability for people as young as 14 to create accounts. Volunteer positions, which could include internships or other work experience, are a key way of getting those younger users to engage more in LinkedIn.
– It is a way to get people who are not actively looking for paid work to keep using LinkedIn to expand their horizons.
“When I talk with LinkedIn members, many tell me they aren’t actively looking for traditional job opportunities,” writes Reid Hoffman, co-founder and chairman of LinkedIn, writes in a blog post going up today. “Instead, they want to hone or leverage their skills while also making a positive impact on the world.”
– It’s a way of helping out a sector that really needs it. The cynics among you might think that LinkedIn is simply looking for a way to appear like a nice guy all the while driving more traffic to its site, right? But on the other hand, the area of volunteering, particularly for non-profits, is massively undersubscribed.
– It also fits in with a part of LinkedIn’s existing aggregation of profile data. When users create and update their profiles on the site, along with professional experience, you can (just as you do on a resume) include charitable and other non-paid interests in the Volunteer and Causes part of their profiles. Some three million members have added this information to their profiles. Hoffman writes that some 600,000 have indicated they would like to serve on boards or do other skills-based volunteering.
Adding in a marketplace to serve that need not only makes entering that kind of information more relevant, but it increases the chances that more will do so — right now there are more than 259 million members, so three million is not exactly a huge proportion.
Although there are already organizations like CatchAFire built to connect professionals with volunteering opportunities, the fact that we are talking about a fundamentally low-margin business like non-profits means that there is usually less attention paid to these kinds of platforms. Coupling a marketplace for unpaid positions to one that already gets a lot of traffic for paid positions could see a boost of attention for volunteering. In fact, CatchAFire, along with the Taproot Foundation, BoardSource and VolunteerMatch are all partnering with LinkedIn for the service — with LinkedIn serving as a kind of aggregator.
I have reached out to LinkedIn to ask about how much it might cost to list an opportunity on the Volunteer Marketplace and will update this post as I learn more.
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