LinkedIn announces major redesign with Teams meetings integration and Snapchat-inspired Stories

LinkedIn announced this morning a big redesign that should affect many aspects of the web and mobile experience including search and profiles, while also adding new social features. The professional social network received its last fresh coat of paint nearly five years ago, and this new design update aims to “make your LinkedIn experience easy, inclusive, enjoyable, and most importantly to put the community front and center.”

The new search experience will add filters to make it easier to find what you’re looking for between people, posts, jobs, industries, groups, and more. In an effort to make the platform more inclusive, LinkedIn will also add new illustrations to reflect the diverse backgrounds and ethnicities of LinkedIn members.

On the messaging front, LinkedIn will add the ability to edit or delete private messages, react to messages with an emoji, as well as the ability to bulk-manage your messages. The professional social network will also make it easy to start a video meeting with LinkedIn contacts on Microsoft Teams, Zoom, or Verizon’s BlueJeans app. These video meetings integrations are coming to the LinkedIn mobile app later this Fall.

After some initial testing with select LinkedIn users, LinkedIn Stories are now rolling out to all users in the US and Canada. Similar to Snapchat and Instagram Stories, LinkedIn Stories will only be available for 24 hours, allowing users to share brief professional moments with their network. Through tests in various regions around the world, we’ve seen members adopt this format to connect more personally and less formally with their peers and friends. In the COVID world, LinkedIn Stories are letting people replace those essential water cooler moments,” the company explained.

If LinkedIn Stories are rolling out now on mobile, the bigger LinkedIn redesign will start rolling out to all users over the next few months, and the company is still working on other improvements including a dark mode. LinkedIn now boasts a community of 700 million professionals, and the company said it saw increased usage since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic with users sending hundreds of millions of messages every week.

“Whether we’re navigating a COVID downturn or post-COVID recovery, addressing an existing skills gap or a coming skills revolution, breaking systemic barriers to equal opportunity, or tackling whatever else defines work in the future, we’re fully committed to continuing to provide the tools and experiences that will let every professional connect to the right opportunities for them,” the team said today.