LinkedIn Games: Yay or Nay?
LinkedIn launched gaming on its platform. Is it a hit or a miss? What would I do if I was the CEO of LinkedIn Games?
Introduction
LinkedIn recently launched gaming on its platform with the premise of attracting more members and increasing member engagement.1 In this blog, I evaluate LinkedIn Games and then use the Working Backwards framework2 to design my version of LinkedIn Games.
LinkedIn Overview
LinkedIn’s mission is to connect the world’s professionals and to make them more productive and successful.3 LinkedIn started in 2002 as a social networking platform to help its members build professional connections, find the right job and hire the right talent. LinkedIn was acquired by Microsoft in 2016 for $26.2 billion and currently has more than 1 billion members.4
More than 141 million members use LinkedIn every day, 61 million members use LinkedIn for job search every week and 6 people are hired every minute. 67 million companies are listed on LinkedIn and LinkedIn is the also most trusted social media advertising platform for brands.
Introducing LinkedIn Games
Why Games and what is LinkedIn trying to solve?
According to LinkedIn, one of the best ways to deepen relationships at work is to have fun together. So the company thinks that competing with connections can spark conversations, break the ice and forge relationships.
Games are also a means to increase engagement for its LinkedIn members, which can be another source for advertisement, hence bringing more revenue for LinkedIn.
What games can you play?
You can currently play three games on LinkedIn - Pinpoint, Queens and Crossclimb.5
Pinpoint is a word association game, where you have to guess the common category from the words shown in the game.
Queens is a logic game similar to Sudoku, where you have to fill the grid with queens to ensure that there’s only one queen in every row, column and region with no queens touching each other.
Lastly, Crossclimb is a trivia game which is a combination of a crossword and a word ladder. You have to use your Trivia knowledge to fill out words in the ladder and then rearrange words such that each word in the ladder differs by only one letter - which unlocks the final clues to win the game.
There will only be one edition of each game every day, with Pinpoints and Crossclimbs being created by Paolo Pasco, the winner of American Crossword Puzzle Tournament and Queens being created by Thomas Snyder, the three-time World Sudoku Champion.
You can look at which of your connections have played today’s game and there will be school and company leaderboards to compete against your coworkers and classmates.
What do I think about LinkedIn Games?
LinkedIn is essentially competing with Wordle6 with the assumption that when Wordle goes behind a paywall, there will be a set of users who are hooked to playing word games - but don’t want to pay for a subscription will play word games on LinkedIn.
If there’s enough engagement on games, LinkedIn can earn additional advertising dollars and in the long run, LinkedIn games can also be another value proposition for LinkedIn premium.
I use LinkedIn everyday, but I don’t go to LinkedIn to play word games. Just because LinkedIn has games and is nudging me to play games, does not mean that I am going to play games on the platform. I go to LinkedIn to build professional connections, share content and learn new things.
If I want a quick detox from work, I’d rather talk to someone or browse Instagram. I also doubt that the game leaderboards are going to drive interaction with coworkers or classmates, you haven’t talked in ages.
Working Backwards Exercise
Now, this is my opinion on LinkedIn games and I might be completely wrong. So, lets do a thought exercise to understand who uses LinkedIn, what are their needs and how their needs could be solved using LinkedIn Games.
Who uses LinkedIn and what are their needs?
According to me, LinkedIn has four types of mutually exclusive users - Job Seekers, Employers or Head Hunters, Content Creators and Influencers and Learners.
Job Seekers are members looking for a job. They want to find opportunities that match their interests, want to up-skill themselves to meet the job requirements, want to get their profile noticed among hundreds of other applicants and finally want to land a job
Employers or Head hunters are members looking for candidates to fill the open positions. They want their job openings to reach the right candidates, want to filter candidates that meet the minimum requirements, want to shortlist the best candidates from the pool and finally hire the right candidates
Content creators or Influencers are members looking to share knowledge or build their personal brand. They want to curate their content, want to optimize their content strategy, want their content to reach the right audience and essentially increase engagement on their content
Learners are members looking to learn new things. They want their feed to show content that meets their current needs
If I was the CEO of LinkedIn Games, what would I do?
I’d like to prioritize solving problems for Job Seekers and Employers first. Around 8.72 million apply for jobs on LinkedIn everyday and it would be awesome if I can use gamification to help more job seekers get jobs and have more employers hire candidates.
How will I use gamification to solve my users problems?
LinkedIn Challenges
LinkedIn Challenges is a game for candidates to prove their skills by solving challenges and getting points for the same. These challenges can be similar to Leetcode problems or Topcoder challenges, where LinkedIn members can be scored in terms of different metrics such as accuracy, creativity, speed to completion etc.
When these members apply for jobs on LinkedIn, scores from LinkedIn Challenges can act as a filtering mechanism for employers to find the best candidates that meet their requirements. Employers can also have job specific challenges, which job seekers can participate-in and the top scorers can get moved to the hiring loop.
Moonshot: LinkedIn Upskill
LinkedIn Upskill is a game based curriculum for LinkedIn members to learn new skills and get certified for completing the same. There’s already a few games that teach programming7 and I’d start by integrating with these games to test product market fit, rather than building something in-house. Once I have found a fit, I’d work with educators and educators to develop games to teach skills such as UX Design, AI and Cloud Computing to name a few.
These certified skills will be showed on the candidate’s profile and can be used by employers to filter candidates for the open positions they are hiring for.
Bonus: LinkedIn Curator
LinkedIn Curator game is for LinkedIn users who have turned on the creator more. The curator tool will review the content created and provide suggestions on how the content can be optimized, such as by adding images or hashtags and the content creator will be awarded points for optimizing their content. The curator tool will also award points for consistency and other parameters, so that the creator learns how to optimize content for the LinkedIn algorithm.
How will I make money from these games?
All these games can have a freemium model, where users get to try a few games for free and they would have to subscribe to LinkedIn premium to unlock new levels. I can also show personalized advertisements in the free levels. For employers, these games can be part of the LinkedIn business talent solutions offering as well.8
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So this was my attempt to evaluate LinkedIn games and to use the Working Backwards framework to design my version of LinkedIn games. What do you think about this blog? Do share your feedback and suggestions in the comment section below.
If you are new here, my name is Kushal and I currently work as a Senior Product Manager at SoFi. I also do quizzing, podcasting and standup comedy for fun. Do subscribe to my blog if you’d like to read more such interesting posts on product thinking, product strategy and other things I am curious about.