Introducing the Newest Features for Small Businesses on LinkedIn

As small business owners work around the clock to manage and adapt their businesses, we’ve pulled together some resources and tools to help you navigate this new normal. We also hosted a livestream to deep dive into all of these updates. Be sure to tune into a playback of our livestream and read on for the latest on our new features for small businesses:

Stay connected to your community with LinkedIn Events

?We recently integrated LinkedIn Events into the Pages experience to help you strengthen relationships with your customers, colleagues, and communities by being able to easily create and join professional events. For small businesses especially, Events can be used to keep your customers up to date on how your business is doing and connect with your communities. For example, Marketing Technologies recently hosted a virtual Lunch-and-Learn on metal stamping for more than 30 attendees, while Hackages used a LinkedIn Event to promote their upcoming YouTube livestream, where they taught their viewers advanced coding languages from an expert.

Access relevant LinkedIn Learning courses for free

?We recognize that not every small business leader has a minute to pause. But for those that do, we’re offering free LinkedIn Learning courses through the end of August to help you navigate these challenging times. These courses can help you hone your skills in management, sales, marketing, finance--and most importantly--foster well-being. As part of our free courses, we’re also launching four new courses to help small business owners lead and pivot their business during difficult times: 

• Pivoting Your Small Business in a Crisis
• Leading a Small Business Through Crisis
• How to Recession Proof Your Small Business
• How to Adapt Your Small Business in a Recession

Let your Page visitors know how your business is responding to COVID-19

This new custom announcement banner lets nonprofit and healthcare small businesses post critical and timely updates to the top of their Page, so your community can stay up to date on topics like important hiring decisions, how you’re shifting operating priorities, or protecting your workforce. Additionally, we’ve added a “Volunteer” call-to-action button option to help non-profits organizations ask members to volunteer. 

A new way to hire remotely and easily manage job applicants

With the rise of remote work as the professional world changes, the location of where you find your next employee(s) may not be as critical of a factor. We’re rolling out a new way to be able to set a job post’s location to ‘remote’ with LinkedIn Jobs. This new setting is a quick way to attract job seekers looking for remote work, and find top talent no matter where they’re located. It will be rolling out to all job posters over the coming weeks.

In addition, we’re introducing a streamlined new candidate management system that’s fully integrated into your familiar member experience on Linkedin.com. Starting this month, if you are actively hiring, you will be able to rate and review job applicants all in one screen to quickly filter down to the most promising candidates. This includes a new video intro feature that helps evaluate a candidate’s communication and soft skills prior to the first live interview.  And for the first time ever, these hiring tools have been optimized for mobile and built into the LinkedIn app, so you’ll never miss a qualified applicant and can continue hiring conversations on the go. 

While we know the economy won’t feel “normal” for some time, we’re seeing early positive signs emerge as certain sectors and industries begin to hire again. We will be rolling out this redesigned candidate management experience to all LinkedIn Job Posts customers globally over the coming months, so that small businesses can quickly find the right candidates when they need to.

And lastly, to further support small and medium businesses who are hiring during this time, we are offering Talent Hub, our Applicant Tracking System, free of charge for two years to eligible small and medium business customers. 

Tune in to our Small Business Editor’s new weekly liveshow

Jordyn Dahl, our LinkedIn News small business editor, publishes a weekly newsletter with resources, the latest news and conversations dedicated to small business owners. Subscribe here to be notified of future editions and connected with fellow readers, and follow her to tune in to her new weekly liveshow Together In Business every Tuesday at 11 a.m. PST.

While we know this may be a challenging time for small businesses across the country, we hope these new features can help even a little bit in pushing your business forward. More information on the resources and tools for small businesses can be found here.