Linking in well with new surrounds

Steve Cadigan, VP of Talent at LinkedIn, is bullish about the company's future despite a major security breach, writes JJ WORRALL

THIS IS NOT a good time for LinkedIn. The bad news began when security researchers found that the company’s iOS app was collecting information – including passwords – from users’ calendar entries before transmitting it back to LinkedIn servers without their knowledge.

The company explained this was an “opt-in” and published details on how to get rid of the feature. The backtracking was only beginning though.

News broke last Wednesday afternoon that almost 6.5 million LinkedIn passwords had been “compromised”, with encrypted versions of them being published on a Russian hackers forum.

In the hours before that pesky forum post, Steve Cadigan, VP of Talent at LinkedIn, sits in the company’s Dublin offices in Wilton Place and talks of a business which is hiring high-level employees as people want to be associated with “a brand that’s growing”.

Later in the day, once news of the hack had broken, he doesn’t want to talk about the brand or anything else. LinkedIn is in lockdown.

Cadigan is in Ireland to have a closer look at the Dublin offices and it’s their growth (the company recently moved to Wilton Place from Sir John Rogerson’s Quay as it needed more office space) that he wants to talk about.

“Three years ago we had employees in two countries, about 15 to 20 people in London with the rest sprinkled around the States, primarily California. Then at the end of 2009 we made the strategic decision that we were going to grow internationally,” he says, leading to the establishment of the company’s Dublin offices just over two years ago, as well as other locations worldwide.

Cadigan puts the Dublin move down to our familiarity with the English language and an ability to “scale quickly” if needed. Considering other Silicon Valley behemoths like Facebook, Twitter, Google, Apple and others have set up in Ireland as well though, could the decision be more to do with our low rate of corporation tax than anything else?

“Well clearly there’s a lot of factors that go into a decision , my area of expertise is the talent so I can’t speak for the finance or tax guys and what they looked at specifically but the team that I was on was tasked with finding the right people, getting them up to speed quickly, and growing the talent base.”

He discusses harvesting the “talent” coming from our universities. However, the reality is that many of Ireland’s finest graduates are heading for foreign shores, while the number of 19 to 24 year-olds living in the State is 12 per cent lower than it was only six years ago.

With those other Silicon Valley names competing for high-level Irish recruits as well, surely the 12.5 per cent corporate rate was part of the reason to pitch up in Dublin?

“Yeah, you know it very well may have,” he says, before adding that competition with online rivals is “the universe I live in within Silicon Valley”.

Whatever the reasons for being here in Ireland, the employment stats are hard to argue with; 240 signed up since arriving in 2010, representing around a tenth of the company’s global full-time employees. At present there are about 30 open positions within the company and Cadigan is excited to mention an internship program for 16 university students.

Employment at the Dublin office is focused on sales, sales development, marketing, customer services, finance, HR, ad operations and sales operations to support the growing market in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

The pace of development for the professional social networking site has been impressive since its launch on May 5th, 2003. At the end of the first month the company had 4,500 users. Now there are 161 million users in over 200 countries. There are 25 offices in 15 countries, while the site operates in 17 different languages and makes its money through hiring solutions, marketing solutions and premium subscriptions.

Cadigan arrived at LinkedIn in 2009, after working for the likes of Electronic Arts and Cisco over the previous decade. Those three years have seen LinkedIn experience massive expansion across the globe with offices in London, Munich, Delhi, Sao Paulo and more besides. There’s more to come in South America, Africa and the Middle East as well.

For a man with experience in the consequences of over-expansion (during his time at Cisco the company wound up becoming “the biggest landowner in the States” but with plenty of empty office buildings), Cadigan feels this rapid growth has been utterly necessary.

“We’ve been challenged to scale and keep up with our growth. I’ve never had that problem before. I would say that the concerns that we’ve had as we’ve grown centre more around making sure we’ve got a culture that’s rooted really firmly.”

Having just released local language versions of the site in Indonesia and Malaysia, he says online recruitment may be a “$40 billion dollar market” in the near future. “We’re not even close to a billion dollars in that business just yet in terms of revenue. So it’s a huge market.”

As for Ireland, the current functions of the Dublin office will remain the same, he says. “I don’t see the curve in the growth we’ve experienced changing but I don’t see any shock and awe and ‘oh-we’re-gonna-move-some-big- function-here’ announcement.”