Every month, LinkedIn has employees take one Friday off to volunteer their skills for charity, help their local community, or focus on improving themselves. In the past, LinkedIn employees have held a Hackday for veterans, put on a multicultural “Top Chef” competition, and hosted a “WimbledIn” tennis tournament. This month, employees have organized to teach non-profits how to use the LinkedIn website to help jobseekers land a gig.
Jessica Lau, a relationship manager at LinkedIn, detailed the volunteer work in a post on the LinkedIn Blog. LinkedIn’s May inDay was the LinkedIn For Good Foundation’s first Pro Bono inDay – days during which members of the foundation volunteer their skills. From the blog post:
We have always been encouraged to volunteer at different organizations during our InDays and these experiences inspired my colleague Ariana Younai and I to take this May inDay to the next level by organizing an event around non-profits. Along with the support of our coworkers, we created a series of trainings to help jobseekers leverage LinkedIn to manage their careers, recruited our colleagues to volunteer, and worked with a few local nonprofits to conduct the trainings at their offices.
Four workshops were hosted worldwide in Dublin, London, New York, and Mountain View, California. The Mountain View event was attended by non-profits such as Upwardly Global and Goodwill of Silicon Valley. LinkedIn employees trained non-profit employees how to find jobs and manage careers using the LinkedIn website. Volunteers also taught lessons on how to best position themselves on LinkedIn, given the current job market. The goal was to familiarize the non-profits with LinkedIn enough for the non-profits themselves to teach job-seekers how to use the site.
All of these workshops are part of a LinkedIn For Good Foundation initiative to expand volunteer trainings globally, and sessions are being organized for other cities such as Toronto and Chicago. And, while volunteering promote and teach LinkedIn to non-profits might not be the most selfless cause a LinkedIn employee could devote his or her inDay to, it is certainly true that LinkedIn can be a potent tool for helping the jobless find work.
