College is the time in students' lives when everybody wants to know what their plans are for the future and what they're doing with their life. It can be overwhelming, especially when the student has no idea what they want to do.
Today, there seems to be an app for everything, and this category of life is no exception. LinkedIn provides a package of apps that can help students with job interviews, focusing on specific interests, and creating connections in the job market. There is the LinkedIn app, Pulse and Recruiter Mobile. The LinkedIn app is the most general of the apps.
"It's a feed of your updates from your network," said Charlton Soesanto, associate product manager at LinkedIn. "It might include things like people who changed jobs, people who moved recently, anything that your network is sharing, or any news that might be interesting based on the industry and your profile information."
Soesanto said the most important part of the app for college students is its ability to look people up so you can learn more about them.
"As a college student, I'd be really . . . interested in like finding new opportunities and kind of learning about what people do and what people have done to get where they are," Soesanto said.
If a user has a dream job, they can use the LinkedIn app to look up different people in that job, and see what jobs they had to get first as stepping-stones to the top.
It can also help users become more informed in their areas of interest, to narrow their job search down.
"Say maybe you're a pre-med student, and you're connected to other people that are physicians," said Krista Canfield, who works with public relations and mobile product for LinkedIn. "You might see what articles they're sharing about the industry, and news that's going on that day in their industry, or you might see that they changed hospitals and now they're working at another hospital, and actually that's the one you want to intern at."
Another app that LinkedIn has is Pulse. Pulse focuses on reading content, so they put the reading content first and foremost, Soesanto said.
"You have to keep yourself informed, you have to . . . know what's going on in the world . . . and that's where Pulse really comes in," said Ankit Gupta, LinkedIn Pulse's senior product manager.
With Pulse, users can subscribe to topics that they are interested in, or their favorite publishers, and other things that they prefer to show up first when they open the app.
Canfield said students can use the app for classes by browsing the most recent articles that have topics related to their class discussion for the day.
Gupta started working on Pulse in graduate school, as a class project unrelated to LinkedIn. Three years later, LinkedIn acquired Pulse in April 2013.
"For your job, for your industry, or as a student . . . in order to get the job that you want, in order to explore a bunch of industries that you're interested in, Pulse will be the one place to help you do that," Gupta said.
Recruiter Mobile is a third app under LinkedIn, that is not available for students, but Canfield said students should become aware of it for the future.
Joe Roualdes handles public relations for LinkedIn's Talent Solutions business. "It sells products and services to recruiters that help them find the best and brightest people on LinkedIn," Roualdes said. "Essentially any company you can think of is using LinkedIn from a recruiting standpoint."
Whether it is to find connections in the job industry, brush up on facts in the industry before an interview, or helping users become available in the job market, LinkedIn covers multiple bases.
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