Top Cities, Combating unconscious bias, Video calling & more + great conversations about Uber, Barbie, and unpaid internships

Every other week, I share with the product team at LinkedIn new products and experiments that seem to be working — or not!— so that we can all learn from each other. I’m going to start publishing these here, too (with anything confidential x’ed out or removed.) I hope this gives you some ideas for what we’re building, why we’re building it, and how we operate; I’d love your feedback and ideas on everything! – Tomer

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Hey Team, 

We’re coming off several eventful weeks starting with our announcements of key growth milestones, and I'm very excited about our product roadmaps ahead. As you saw in Ryan’s post, we recently surpassed 774 million professionals who come to LinkedIn to connect with their community, learn, create, and find career opportunities. In addition, we also grew to $10 billion in revenue with accelerating growth. Thank you for your continued work to deliver member and customer value every day. When LinkedIn is doing well, it means the world is doing better -- people are getting hired, they are learning, building communities, growing businesses, and ultimately helping create economic opportunities for every professional worldwide. And now, on to our product highlights...

1 Top Companies: City Edition helps members identify the best companies to build a career

One of the biggest decisions for job seekers is where to work. It’s a difficult decision that includes factors like the ability to advance & learn, company stability, diversity, and where to live and make a decent living. This was made all the more daunting amid the pandemic, which is why we launched our newest list Top Companies: City Edition. This list highlights the best companies for your career in 10 growing U.S. markets, including Atlanta, Austin, Boston, Charlotte, Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Dallas, Minneapolis, and Seattle. With the successful launch of this local edition, we plan to expand to more cities globally.

Why this matters: In the midst of the great reshuffle, many people are re-evaluating where they live and work. Professionals have gone from “sheltering in their job” during much of the pandemic to finally being in the driver's seat and putting their priorities first when looking for a job. That’s why we launched this special edition of the Top Companies list - to help connect members to tangible opportunities: Whether that's landing jobs in these cities or developing the skills that are the fastest growing in these areas.

2 New Recruiter experience helps hirers combat unconscious bias 

Being aware of — and fighting — bias in hiring is essential to achieving LinkedIn’s mission. When it comes to hiring, recruiters are looking to fight unconscious bias to help ensure the most qualified candidate gets an offer. At the same time, job seekers want to know they have an equal opportunity to land their next job. To create more equitable outcomes for both recruiters and job seekers, we’re enhancing our Recruiter experience to enable hirers to hide candidate photos & names when sourcing great talent. When the settings are enabled, the hirer will see four randomly generated letters instead of the candidate’s name and an avatar will replace the candidate’s photo. There’s more to come as we work to develop new features to help hirers ensure they are reducing bias in the recruiting process. 

Why this matters: Hiding a candidate’s photo and name might seem like a small change but this is actually a big step forward. There have been countless studies showing hirers may unconsciously use heuristics — like name and photo — to evaluate a candidate’s qualifications, rather than focusing on skills to determine fit. Check out this post for more info on how we’re helping our customers source and build more diverse talent pools. 

3 New video meetings experience means opportunity can be just one call away

We always want to help members connect; and, as video becomes the preferred communication medium for professionals across the world, that means empowering face-to-face meetings on LinkedIn. With our new native 1:1 video meeting experience members can now just click “video call” from a messaging thread and enter your video room. Check out more details on the feature in our Engineering blog post and read about the tech-powered by Microsoft's ACS (Azure Communication Services). Throughout the year we’ll continue to improve 1:1 video meetings through features such as share screen. 

Why this matters: Opportunity can often be just one call away. Today, some of our members move their conversations off LinkedIn because there’s no way for them to connect live, 1:1. That changes with this feature. Whether you’re kicking off your job search or scheduling a 1:1 video call with your manager, we want to enable members to connect virtually while maintaining the context of their conversation. 

4 Refreshed Developer Portal makes it easier to discover our APIs

Members can have very diverse and specialized needs on LinkedIn. To empower every professional to connect to economic opportunity, we empower developers to create seamless experiences for members & customers that are easily integrated into LinkedIn - from helping companies connect their talent workflows to running media campaigns on LinkedIn. However, till now, they’ve been struggling to do it with our current offering -- in their words “The LinkedIn Developer Portal is poorly documented, no info on process and no info on process results.” To make it simpler and more valuable for developers, we re-created the LinkedIn Developer Portal from scratch so they can easily discover, learn about and integrate their apps with our API products.

Why this matters: With these enhancements and resources, we’re able to create member and customer value by empowering developers to build valuable, simple, and trustworthy experiences.

5 Fresh LinkedIn Learning courses offer members the skills they need to stay ahead

The most valuable professional communities are the ones that continuously grow and learn together -- which is why every week we release around 60 new LinkedIn courses from some of the best experts in the world. Here are a few new courses we’ve added:

• Creativity at Work with Seth Godin 
• The New Rules of Work with Gary Bolles
• Aligning Your Values with Work, Life, and Everything In Between with Christina Vo, Madecraft 
• Telling Your Story on the Web in 60 Seconds with Richard Harrington 
• Leading with a Heavy Heart with Kat Cole

Every day I’m amazed by the heart of the LinkedIn community and the incredible sense of purpose, passion, generosity, and humor that is showcased through conversations across the platform. I love seeing all the unique and inspiring posts－and I’m excited to share some of my favorites with you. 

Ilya Klets, Silicon Valley Bank Director, was inspired to reveal a long-kept secret in a post and opens up about his dad’s sacrifice and work ethic: “My dad’s an Uber driver”. 

Miliana Pineda shares the many lessons and skills from working from home over this last year and reinforces the importance of quality time with your home co-workers :)

Kevin Parry shares his animation skills with his community in this awesome post that turns him into other objects.

Katy Leeson celebrates diverse role models for women and congratulates Mattel for creating a Barbie doll of Professor Dame Sarah Gilbert - the scientist who designed the Oxford Coronavirus vaccine.

Dwayne Edwards shares his gratitude for paternity leave and for getting time to focus on being a full-time dad.

With deep gratitude,

Tomer