LinkedIn is testing Career Advice in Australia

Job site LinkedIn has been testing a function called Career Advice in Australia, which serves as a bridge for users prepared to be mentors to those seeking expert advice in their career. There are several fields being tackled, including community and social services, administrative, business and strategy, consulting, design, education, engineering and technology, finance, media and communications, marketing protective services, operations and product management.

The new service can be accessed when a user goes to his profile view, then to the dashboard. After a user picks his preferred industry, LinkedIn will then suggest who to make contact with.

Hari Srinivasan, LinkedIn’s Director of Product Management, said the new function is a world-first interactive platform to offer support and advice to jobseekers. "Essentially it is a new free service that connects LinkedIn members with others in their industry to act as mentors for them, and for those mentee members to seek career advice," he told Business Insider.

Members do not have to be connected with each other on LinkedIn to converse. But those willing to be mentors and those who seek help need to say they are interested. Both sides will state a bit about what they want and Career Advice will match them.

According to Srinivasan, they have seen conversations about “wanting to make a job change” or “starting a company” organically happen and they thought the community could do more. Therefore, they have come up with a product that enables these kinds of interactions.

Career tips

Leela Srinivasan, former director of LinkedIn, stated that making a jump to more senior level positions is tied to a person’s resume and work experience. She suggested looking for a better way to engineer one’s self into a company.

Srinivasan said being proactively sourced is one way to achieve this as it increases the chances of getting hired to one in 72, adding applicants with less experience must detail how they have effectively led a group in prior positions and prove that they have equivalent experience in some way. "Clearly the most effective next step for someone seeking a promotion or a new role is so figure out who you know at the company," CNBC quotes her as saying.

She added that referral is another way to self-engineer an person’s introduction into the HR inbox. According to Lever data, referrals are nearly 10 times more efficient at getting a candidate hired than sending in an application.

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