Looking At The Global Opportunity As LinkedIn Expands Its Job Listings

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Trefis
LNKD: LinkedIn logo
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LinkedIn

At the end of May, LinkedIn (NASDAQ:LNKD) announced its decision to aggregate job listings from other sites, thus creating a new feature called Limited Listings. This feature will be different from LinkedIn Jobs because the new aggregated jobs will be visible only to those candidates who search for them, thus specifically targeting active candidates. While the company may not earn additional revenue from Limited Listings, the move will definitely improve its value proposition and attract more users. This marks LinkedIn’s foray in job aggregator market where Indeed and Simply Hired are big players. The company ultimately wants to become the preferred platform for job seekers, and seems to be progressing well. LinkedIn will double its total job listings to about 700,000 with this new feature. We estimate that the total addressable market for LinkedIn in terms for job listings could be somewhere between 3 million and 6 million. We believe that within the next five years, LinkedIn could easily capture a big share of it.

Our price estimate for LinkedIn stands at $134, implying a discount of little over 15% to the market price.

See our complete analysis for LinkedIn

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Looking At Global Opportunity In Job Listings

Some of the biggest job sites such as Monster and Career Builder have more than 1 million job listings. Simply Hired, the world’s biggest job search engine, has more than 8 million job listings and 30 million monthly users globally. [1] It is fundamentally different from pure job listing sites as it partners with about 25,000 partner sites, including LinkedIn, and aggregates job postings across all of their partners. Given this, some of the jobs listed on Simply Hired are likely to be duplicates as recruiters tend to advertise the same job on multiple job boards. Also, jobs may be duplicates if multiple recruiting agencies advertise the same job.

While Simply Hired can be taken as a benchmark to determine LinkedIn’s opportunity in job postings, we need to estimate the acutal umber of job listings could ultimately list.  In particular, we need to primarily eliminate the duplicates that arise from a single recruiter posting same job opening on multiple sites.

We can assume a range of 20-50% for “percentage of job postings that are duplicates“. That gives us a potential market size of  4 million to 6.5 million global job postings at any given time.   (Note that this is not an annualized market). We strip out another 10% due to the possibility of ‘stale’ jobs that may remain on a site even after being filled. This brings the global market size to 3 to 6 million job postings. These figures imply that at any point in time, 3 to 6 million jobs are advertised on online job portals. This is our estimate of the addressable market for LinkedIn .

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Notes:
  1. Simply Hired Crunchbase Profile []