High-school students are notoriously susceptible to temptations that can turn into lifetime habits. Smoking. Drinking. What about online career networking?
LinkedIn on Monday said it would open its website to minors for the first time starting September 12, allowing kids as young as 13 to sign up for the service in most countries. In the U.S., however, the minimum age will be set at 14, while the aspiring professionals of China, which has strict rules on web use for minors, will have to wait until they’re 18. The professional-networking site also announced that it was launching pages for universities which the schools themselves will maintain, in the hopes that ambitious high school students will begin using LinkedIn to help decide which college to attend.
Why would any high schooler waste even one second of their fleeting youth on LinkedIn? That’s unclear, but the youth movement makes sense for LinkedIn. Unlike its rivals in social networking, the professionals of tomorrow remain an untapped population for LinkedIn. Only 15 percent of its users are under 25, according to Quantcast. (Interestingly, six percent of its users are under 18 despite being officially banned—proving that the spirit of Alex P. Keaton lives on in the digital age.) By comparison, half of all Facebook users and 39 percent of Twitter users are under 25, while the under-18 set makes up 26 percent of Facebook’s population and 17 percent of Twitter.
There’s no reason why these sites couldn’t move into the more specialized services LinkedIn provides. In regulatory filings, the career website has acknowledged that non-professional social networks are a potentially serious threat to its business model. Facebook has already begun to nibble at the edges of the job market. Last November, the social-networking giant launched an app that allowed employers to share open positions. Of course, Facebook doesn’t necessarily have to even do anything itself to continue pushing into LinkedIn’s turf. A survey conducted by the National Association of Colleges and Employers last year found that half of all employers are already using Facebook in hiring decisions, and 54 percent of employers think it will become more important in the future.
This isn’t to say that LinkedIn is facing any immediate crisis. Instead, it has been a rare bright spot among a disappointing crop of technology companies that have gone public in the last few years. LinkedIn’s stock price is selling for about twice what it was at the beginning of this year, and it continues to add users at a faster rate than Facebook. At the same time, the average time a user spends on LinkedIn has stagnated.
The company seems to see its continued success as a professional network to rely on expanding its role as far beyond just recruiting. It has been hard at work this year to expand into something of a content network. In April it purchased Pulse, a news reading app, for $90 million and has built a stable of “influencers” to write for the site. But as product oriented around professionals, there is a natural limit to the network’s expansion. Getting stressed high school students to start signing up while they’re cramming for their SATs could be the best defense against losing them to competitors before they even think about filing out their first resume.
