LinkedIn, the social network platform for business and business professionals has launched an online resource dedicated to small businesses for navigating the post lockdown period. LinkedIn for Small Businesses is offering free services that include tips, resources, business tools, courses, and recruiting services to help small businesses.
LinkedIn Small Business Pandemic Recovery
These resources run the full gamut of delivering badly need tools. This includes marketing, hiring, selling, and learning all designed to work together to suit the individual needs of your company.
Through Jordyn Dahl LinkedIn, LinkedIn News’ small business editor even publishes a weekly newsletter with resources, news and conversations dedicated and tailored to the needs of small business owners.
Connecting, Engaging and Marketing within Communities
Through LinkedIn Events, you can create an event to share with your network and wider audience. You can use it for both in-person and online events. Among these features include making it easier for businesses to create and join professional events for communities.
This is will allow for better collaborations and networking among customers, colleagues, and communities to get business done. LinkedIn believes through such events businesses, particularly small businesses, will continue their engagements with their customers to update them on important events.
For example, with LinkedIn Events, you can host a virtual event for a product launch and showcase the features online thus providing customers with deeper insights into the product. You can also provide online courses, host alumni meetings, convene networking events, workshops and business conferences.
You can also promote your online training courses with it. To host your professional development event include a link to an external ticketing site. You can then share the event with your professional network.
Through LinkedIn, you can create a LinkedIn from your personal profile or company page. For even better targeting for your events you can also invite your 1st-degree connections to the event. You can also set up the events as public or private. Simply put in a public event, and anyone can choose to attend. If it’s private, only invited guests or people who have the link to the event can see and attend events.
Develop your Skills through Free Courses
LinkedIn is offering small business leaders with the opportunity to fine-tune their skills through LinkedIn Learning and LinkedIn Blog. The courses include training in management, sales, marketing as well as well being courses such as stress management, building resilience and others.
There are free courses as well as subscription-based courses with a one-month free trial. Keeping in mind the needs of businesses during this period of transition, LinkedIn is providing these courses for free until the end of August.
Specifically, for small businesses, LinkedIn is launching four new free courses to help small business owners. These include Pivoting Your Small Business in a Crisis; Leading a Small Business Through Crisis; How to Recession Proof Your Small Business; and How to Adapt Your Small Business in a Recession.
LinkedIn has some 15,000 courses while adding more than 60 new courses every week in 7 languages by credible experts. Most of these courses come with quizzes, exercise file, and other study tools for greater impact. The courses are available both online and offline to help you access them whenever and wherever you are.
The platform provides a personalized recommendation in order to focus on your goals at the moment. Suggestions are also offered by providing relevant courses from your LinkedIn connections, peers learning, and the right skills so you can succeed in your career.
LinkedIn is a Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) provider similar to Udemy, Coursera, MIT OpenCourseWare, Stanford Online and others and is worth looking up.
New Tool to Recruit and Process Job Application Remotely
The platform has also launched a new tool to help businesses recruit and hire remotely. With social distancing in effect, businesses can now screen candidates using LinkedIn’s new video intro feature to screen candidates on their communications and soft skills.
This feature allows candidates to answer their questions through a video recording or write in their answers in real-time. This helps determine whether candidates are a good fit in terms of personality traits and other soft skills.
Applicants might show a strong promise on paper and might not measure up in terms of their people’s skills. Rather than wait to find out on these shortcomings, businesses particularly those who rely heavily on customer services, can use this option to see whether the candidates have those people’s skills they are looking for.
As the candidate applies for the job on LinkedIn, he or she can add a video introduction to the post. Recruiters can also opt to invite individual applicants to a video interview. This lets them get a better feel of the candidate’s capabilities.
Takeaway
Over the years LinkedIn has made the name of being the premium platform for B2B, originations, recruiters and professionals. With an estimated more than 600 million users, this platform gains one new member every 2 seconds. So it is no wonder why it’s the largest professional network in the world. The available tools for networking, recruiting and tutorials alone make for a good opportunity to raise your game, that is if you are not already on it.
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Image: LinkedIn
This article, “LinkedIn Makes Resources Available for Small Business Recovery” was first published on Small Business Trends