In the ever-evolving landscape of global business, startups and professionals across the Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) region are increasingly using LinkedIn to forge meaningful and transformative connections.
In this exclusive interview, Ali Matar, EMEA growth markets leader and head of LinkedIn MENA, provides valuable insights into the pivotal role that this platform plays in cultivating professional networks. Furthermore, Matar sheds light on the influence of cutting-edge technologies, notably artificial intelligence (AI), in revolutionizing the dynamics for both LinkedIn and its extensive user base.
How can startups in the EMEA region leverage LinkedIn to attract talent, raise capital and expand their networks effectively? What unique opportunities does LinkedIn offer?
As the world’s largest professional network with more than 950 million members globally, we support businesses to identify opportunities, connect with other companies and industry leaders, and find top talent.
In fact, eight hires are made every minute on the platform and over 840,000 companies worldwide use our LinkedIn Talent Solutions. Features like the “open to work” photo frame (used by more than 24 million LinkedIn members), and the “#hiring” profile ring (every minute 13 hirers are turning on the feature), help hirers to identify and attract candidates.
However, LinkedIn is not only about hiring. We offer members in different career stages – from career starters to executives – a place to nurture professional relationships, showcase their experience and build the skills they need to advance at work through relevant and timely content.
The value LinkedIn adds to professionals and hirers every day is reflected in our member numbers. We are proud to have gained over 56 million members in the Middle East and North Africa, including 6 million in the United Arab Emirates and 7 million in Saudi Arabia.
Some of our features include:
- LinkedIn Recruiter: A tool designed to help recruiters and talent acquisition professionals find, connect with and hire top talent.
- AI-powered job descriptions: We’re testing AI-powered job descriptions to help hirers find qualified candidates faster.
- Diversity nudges in Recruiter: This feature proactively lets hirers know when there’s a lack of women in their search and suggests ways of changing search criteria to balance the talent pool.
- LinkedIn Jobs: Employers can post job adverts and target them to relevant candidates, even if they’re not actively searching for a job to find qualified matches.
- LinkedIn Talent Insights: A talent intelligence platform that empowers companies to make smart workforce and hiring decisions. Powered by LinkedIn’s data and insights, it provides workforce benchmarks, skills trends and real-time supply and demand data.
- Commitments: LinkedIn’s Commitments feature helps companies showcase their action around diversity, equity and inclusion, environmental sustainability, and social impact.
Read: Effective use of LinkedIn for business leaders
In the context of digital transformation, what key skills and competencies do you believe are crucial for professionals to thrive in the technology sector today?
Amid ongoing digital advancements, tech roles are surging in demand across the MENA region. According to a recent LinkedIn study, four out of the top 10 roles in Saudi Arabia were in cybersecurity, data analysis and software development. The UAE also witnessed a growing demand for tech-based jobs, with three out of the top 10 jobs being software development positions.
AI skills are also going to become essential, as we can all probably tell. At LinkedIn, we have already seen a significant 21-fold increase in global, English-language job listings mentioning AI technologies, including ChatGPT, since November 2022.
But it is important to note that professionals and leaders across countries, according to our data, are placing a growing focus on soft skills as well, i.e. skills that can only be acquired and practiced by humans. In our region, professionals believe interpersonal skills such as problem-solving (66 percent in the UAE; 74 percent in KSA), time management (69 percent in UAE; 75 percent in KSA) and resilience (67 percent in UAE; 74 percent in KSA) will gain more importance as AI grows in prominence.
How is LinkedIn leveraging AI and automation to enhance user experiences and help tech professionals discover relevant opportunities and connections?
As we recognize AI’s potential to boost productivity for both businesses and professionals, we not only help our members learn how they can leverage GAI effectively, but we are also launching a number of tools and features that will help them day-to-day:
For example, we are rolling out personalized writing suggestions via our Profile and Messaging solutions. We have also launched Collaborative Articles, an AI-powered conversation starter that brings together expert perspectives with knowledge topics published by LinkedIn.
With growing concerns about data privacy and cybersecurity, what advice would you give professionals on maintaining a strong online presence while safeguarding their personal information?
We are proud to say that LinkedIn is the most trusted social network by businesses and members in the region and worldwide as per a recent report. We remain committed to making sure our platform is safe, trusted, and professional; and we make it simple to report unprofessional behavior and manage privacy and security settings.
We use technology, including AI, to detect and address harmful content. We’ve pre-emptively blocked 99.6 percent of detected fake accounts and 99.3 percent of detected spam and scams were removed by our automated defenses. We also encourage our members to report any violations that they may spot immediately.
Could you elaborate on LinkedIn’s initiatives to support continuous learning and skill development for professionals, especially in emerging technologies like AI, blockchain and IoT?
Skills are the currency of the future job market. We are increasingly seeing the skills-first hiring approach gain traction with 45 percent of recruitment professionals active on the platform today already embracing this approach to fill their roles.
We have long championed this trend at LinkedIn and we remain committed to helping people get hired based on their skills, rather than solely based on educational qualification or experience.
To this end, we offer our members a wealth of resources, making LinkedIn a place for learning and upskilling. Through our extensive library of LinkedIn Learning courses, we offer our members over 21,000 videos covering 39,000 skills, with more than 100 hours of Learning content that is consumed every minute. When it comes to AI, we recently unlocked our most popular AI courses for free until the end of the year, a good starting point for users to start learning about the new tech.
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