India numbers help LinkedIn cross 100-mn mark in APAC region

Crossing the 37-million-users mark rapidly in the country has helped jobs portal LinkedIn speed part the 100-million-members mark in the Asia Pacific region.  As a result, its user base has doubled in the past two years.

Currently, India is LinkedIn’s second-largest user base after its home country, the US. Now, the social network for professionals is targeting campus recruits to grow even faster.  China, with the largest Internet population in the world, has a little over 23 million users on Linkedin.

“At this scale, LinkedIn is in an even stronger position to help members connect to economic opportunity, whether it’s a new job, a promotion or other business opportunities,” said Olivier Legrand, managing director, Asia-Pacific and Japan, LinkedIn, in a statement.

With an estimated 280 million white-collar professionals in the region, LinkedIn said there was a lot more headroom for growth.

In India, the company rolled out a new platform to target campus recruits, piling onto the massive entry-level job market in order to grow its user base. LinkedIn is also growing its development centre in India’s information technology hub Bengaluru, which is pushing out innovations to make the platform better suited for low bandwidth and mobile-first markets.

These efforts are also being exported to other geographies, especially Southeast Asian markets that are similar to India, which is helping make APAC the fastest growing region for LinkedIn.

In June this year US technology giant Microsoft bought LinkedIn for $26.6 billion as a way for it to build a presence in the professional social networking space.