Mediaboss Marketing

LinkedIn is hoping that it can attract blue collar workers like carpenters, electricians, delivery drivers, waiters and joiners.

After a few years out of the workforce to care for his youngest son, Klaus Thorsen spruced up his LinkedIn profile. Not that unusual, you may think. After all, the careers networking site has more than 330m registered users.

Except that Mr Thorsen is a north London carpenter hoping to find contacts and employment on a site where job titles such as builder are more typically used to describe someone who creates online communities than a construction worker.

Mr Thorsen admits he would never have joined LinkedIn if it were not for his partner, Karen Fugle, an executive coach to architects. If youre not in the corporate world its a big step, [it's] baffling, she says. That is not to say Mr Thorsen does not use technology; he is an enthusiastic Twitter user, deploying it to keep up with industry news and finds work through referrals from local websites such as Streetlife. com, a neighbourhood social network.

If LinkedIn has its way, however, more people like Mr Thorsen will become members of the site without nudges from executive coaches and expand the numbers beyond the throngs of accountants, lawyers and marketers already signed up, to include delivery drivers, waiters and joiners.

Allen Blue, co-founder of LinkedIn, wants the site to shed its elitist image as an exclusive club for knowledge workers. LinkedIn last year bought Bright, a US job site that uses a scoring mechanism to match job hunters with employers. The acquisition brought jobs to the site from sectors beyond LinkedIns traditional white-collar heartland.

Now if you do a job search, there are lots of possibilities, says Mr Blue. Theres a growing number of blue-collar workers on the site.

The company certainly talks big. There are billions of workers in the world, says Mr Blue, and LinkedIn has ambitions to sign up every single one of them. We consider all of these [AS]people we can deliver value to, says Mr Blue. Moreover, data compiled from LinkedIn members profiles could, for example, help employers plan where to build a factory or distribution centre based on the local labour forces skills, he argues.

LinkedIn hopes to create the worlds first economic graph, its version of Facebooks social graph, coined to describe its networks of friends. As Jeff Weiner, the chief executive, has explained: We want to digitally map the global economy, identifying the connections between people, jobs, skills, companies and professional knowledge and spot in real-time the trends pointing to economic opportunities.

While LinkedIn is, in Mr Blues words, professionally paranoid about Facebooks plans to create a professional networking channel, called Facebook at Work, he believes users prefer to keep personal and work lives separate.

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LinkedIn calls on builders, waiters and carpenters to join network