LinkedIn, the Microsoft-owned platform for those connecting with others in their fields of work and those looking for work, has best known in recruitment sourcing candidates as well as advertising job openings for permanent work. Now, to complement that, LinkedIn is opening a new front in the job market for freelancers.

Today it launches its Service Marketplace, a new feature which will allow people to advertise themselves for short-term engagements to those looking for people to hire for such roles and competing with the likes of Fiverr and Upwork for sourcing skilled knowledge workers.

This is coming as the platform gears up its freelancer platform launch, along with a few other important updates from LinkedIn on other job-hunting tools. It is proof of how the company comes out to adapt to the present-new trends of changes in the job market and how we work.

They also add new filters when you search for jobs: you can now filter for work that can be done from anywhere, in hybrid settings or in the office; and those same jobs can now be displayed on your "Open to Work" indicator if you have that turned on and want recruiters to reach out to you. At the same time, you can see companies' vaccination requirements as part of how you'll consider weighing up jobs (if the employer has provided that information itself).

Service Marketplace was stealthily spilled out as a test in February of this year. Since then LinkedIn has operated the service in beta over here in the U.S. It has already attracted 2 million users among the nearly 800 million users (as of yesterday's earnings report) that LinkedIn now has globally.

As of today, Service Marketplace is being enabled to everyone in the world: to create a freelancer profile, go to your own profile page, find that button up near the top, and follow the script to get it set up and flag anything you might be interested in working on.

The new feature marks an interesting turning point for LinkedIn under the wing of Microsoft, which picked up about 25 million new users in the last quarter.

The company has long been building out what it has described as the "economic graph," the idea being that you can build a bigger understanding of the global economy by mapping out how people interconnect in their professional relationships.

Its aim in so doing, of course, is to give greater underpinning to the very commercial pursuits of its business, namely recruitment: the platform sells premium subscriptions to recruiters to source more data about potential candidates, advertise jobs and help those looking for jobs find work.

That business has been growing at a steady clip. LinkedIn said in yesterday's earnings call that confirmed hires on the platform increased more than 160% year over year, with advertising revenue overall up 61% in the same period. It is managing to upsell those doing recruiting to its wider suite of training content, too: LinkedIn Learning now has more than 15,000 enterprise customers.

But at the same time, LinkedIn pushes a significant share of the market out, as the last ten years were a period when people switched from " permanent and full-time" toward a more short-term freelance-type positions.

While there's been nothing to keep them from using LinkedIn to network, stay in touch with others in their field, and maybe even find jobs, until now LinkedIn hadn't had any formal way to engage in the latter of these, and specifically to monetize it.

While Service Marketplace is not charging fees, like its other recruiting products at LinkedIn today, this sets up how LinkedIn could in the future.
The Service Marketplace is coming with 250 job categories, and its goal will be 500, according to an interview that I conducted with Matt Faustman, a product manager.

"We are barely scratching the surface," he said. Marketing has been one of the stronger categories so far on the marketplace, he added.

(Sidenote: Faustman joined LinkedIn when his previous startup, legal tech specialist UpCounsel, was acquired by LinkedIn. His first project there was to build a marketplace to help source lawyers for short-term jobs, which has naturally evolved into him working on the wider Service Marketplace.)

Barely scratching the surface" may be the operative phrase here.

For now, there is no way of negotiating a fee for work, nor for invoicing, and those looking to find people are not required to give any specific guidance on fees until they get into a deeper conversation with a candidate.

With reviews, for instance, the clients can review those that they have engaged, but the individuals cannot leave a reciprocal review for the clients.

And, those listing their profiles on the Marketplace have no way of finding jobs themselves: they are there to be discovered, not to search for work.

The larger drop-down search menu will allow your clients to search for people to fill jobs: so if you're looking to hire specialists in brand marketing, you can type that phrase in the search window, and LinkedIn will auto-complete with "in Service Marketplace, which will get you a list of candidates in that category.

Then, those candidates will be sorted, based on how directly you the client might be connected to each individual, either through work or personal relationships.

But again, the brand marketing specialists, for instance, can't scan a larger list of opportunities. All the current limitations are intentional, said Faustman-it has, for now, built this for the client experience and the idea is that by letting them make targeted asks, they don't get swamped in applications that they then have to spend time triaging.

Over time this, along with all the other features missing-things like payments-will be reassessed, he says.".

That would be important, if LinkedIn is going to be able to get credibility from the workforce that it's trying to build out here. Freelancers often suffer from a lack of transparency on rates and the risk of being taken advantage of as a result through low-balling, a point Faustman acknowledged is an issue and said was a point of contention within LinkedIn's product team.

"We will deal with the issue of pricing point, but we decided not to for now," he said.

Another interesting turn is how and if LinkedIn will bring other kinds of workers into the marketplace, covering the wider population of people who are working on the front line and other service jobs. There is no immediate roadmap to include them in the Service Marketplace, Faustman said, but "the long term is that we can extend this into any category that exists on LinkedIn."