LinkedIn launches Korean service

Arvind Rajan, managing director and vice president in charge of Asia Pacific and Japan at LinkedIn

By Yoon Ja-young

LinkedIn, the biggest social networking service dedicated to professionals, launched a Korean language service.

LinkedIn is wholly dedicated to forming professional ties unlike Twitter and Facebook which focus more on the private life of users. As a platform to expand a person’s network and for finding employment, users upload their resumes and profiles to make professional connections.

“All professions today live their lives through three different circles of social life, life with their family and life as a professional,” said Arvind Rajan, managing director & vice president in charge of Asia Pacific and Japan at LinkedIn.

He said that the service is to completely take care of the necessary aspects of maintaining professional life online. “It’s not about games or exchanging pictures of your family,” he said.

He added that LinkedIn has fundamentally changed the way the world works, defining it as a truly unique network where people find their dream career opportunities as well as their customers.

Unlike resume sites where only active jobseekers join, LinkedIn users may come across better job opportunities by chance, Rajan said, as users can track where others have gone and what jobs they have. They can also follow a company they are interested in, to get information about changes in leadership and job vacancies there. It is an effective means of expanding a network as well since one can tap into connections others have made. He cited an example of two LinkedIn users in two different countries, who met on LinkedIn and ended up starting an iPhone battery business together.

LinkedIn has over 135 million users, over half of whom live outside the United States, and two new members join every second. Rajan said it has huge growth potential as there are still over 640 million professionals all over the world, let alone a complete workforce of some 33 billion.

Even before offering the site in Korean, already 300,000 Korean professionals had created profiles on LinkedIn. The top three companies in the country with the most employees on LinkedIn are LG Electronics, Samsung and SK Telecom according to the service. Major companies also have representative pages on the site.

He said that by connecting users in Korea, it can create new career and business opportunities for them. “It is the 13th economy in the world, of course, and it has one of the most sophisticated online populations,” he said, citing the huge market as another reason for offering the service in Korean. He expected the pool of users to expand steeply.

Now along with Korean, LinkedIn is available in 14 languages, and Rajan said it won’t stop augmenting the site to service other languages.

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