
This could mean that actually applying for the jobs will grow that time spent on the mobile app even further - offering the company an attractive metric that it can use to help grow its mobile ads revenues (also introduced recently) as well as the promise of better returns to those companies advertising jobs in the first place.

The existing jobs feature on the LinkedIn apps lets you browse both through search and by offering job recommendations, and those job searches already make up more than 30% of all of LinkedIn’s mobile traffic (coincidentally, the same proportion of traffic that LinkedIn gets from mobile overall), and “we’re seeing members who never view jobs on the desktop, viewing and saving jobs on mobile,” writes Goel. In a very short space of time, jobs have proven to be a popular feature of the mobile apps, which got a major upgrade in April. LinkedIn is still offering businesses to link out to their own sites to complete job applications, but offering a service like this is one way of trying to get them to push more activity to LinkedIn’s platform. And perhaps more importantly, it raises LinkedIn’s own profile as a repository of information about you: if you use LinkedIn for job searches, there is a chance you may end up now uploading more and richer information about yourself for that profile to become more usable as a resume in itself. It has created a way for you to use the profile you already have on LinkedIn itself to effectively become your resume. LinkedIn’s job application service does therefore does a couple of things. Vaibhav Goel, a mobile product manager, notes that one of the drawbacks of applying for jobs via mobile devices up to now had been the pain of uploading and editing resumes on a small screen. The ability to apply without resumes is an interesting development for LinkedIn.

LinkedIn says the service is rolling out globally, starting today with English-speaking members. Now it will let jobseekers seal the deal, so to speak: from today, users will start to be able to actually apply for those jobs via the apps as well, with the option of using their LinkedIn profiles as resume proxies. Last month, LinkedIn introduced the ability for users of its social network for the working world to search for jobs via its iOS and Android mobile apps.
