For companies like LinkedIn, the relationship between candidate and customer is a delicate balance, hinged on employer branding and hiring experience.

In an ideal scenario, every employee at your organization is an avid user of your company’s product, and all teams—from sales to development—have a personal investment in its success. Few organizations can make such a claim, but working for a company as ubiquitous as LinkedIn means high probability your employees double as users. The same can be said of the thousands of candidates who apply to work for the networking platform, particularly at the collegiate level, which falls under the jurisdiction of Emily Campana, Director of Global Campus Recruiting.

Since joining in 2011, Emily has worked her way up the LinkedIn ladder, from senior recruiter to her directorial role, and gleaned an intimate look at the company’s brand, values, and social purpose along the way. To learn more about navigating the tricky balance between candidates and customers, we invited Emily to speak at our Hiring Success conference in San Francisco.

“We have a strong consumer brand because we have so many members on the platform,” says Campana. By LinkedIn’s recent count, over 575 million—nearly 55 million of whom are college students. “But, we’ve never sat down with marketing and asked ‘what’s our EVP’, or ‘how are we going to build content for that?’ What’s happened has been pretty organic.”

The rest, Campana says, is driven by LinkedIn recruiters. “We teach our recruiters the full story of how LinkedIn came to pass, the company’s values, what we are working on, how we believe we are changing the world, and then really dive into culture and values—we call it master storyteller.” LinkedIn then asks its recruiters to promote the company brand in conversations with candidates, in a way that goes beyond job descriptions.

“Our recruiters spend time with candidates to understand what their motivators are,” says Campana. “Then, we speak to those through our culture, values, organization, and design. This way our recruiters drive the overall brand with our candidates.”

And this step is important for a company whose product is widely recognized, but whose employer brand is not advertised so much. “Our candidates believe that they know a lot about our company because they are users,” explains Campana. “We have to help them understand the consumer side of our business, and we get a lot of suggestions as a result.” And while LinkedIn welcomes critique from users, customers’ understanding of the business is often one-sided.

“Many people believe that we are just a TA product,” says Campana, “but we also have a sales product, a learning product, a marketing product, as well as our broader mission about what LinkedIn does to help empower and make professionals more successful.”

For students preparing to enter the workforce, LinkedIn hosts career-focused events at campuses across the country, where participants can receive help with their profiles, take headshots, and, according to Tey Scott, former Senior Director of Global Talent Acquisition at LinkedIn, “help them land their dream job regardless of our recruiting efforts.”

These day-long development events are held in target cities like Atlanta, Boston, and San Francisco—regions with concentrated clusters of universities. By moving away from recruiting at university career fairs—a tactic that only reached about 40 universities per year—LinkedIn adopted a more scalable method that allowed the company to expand its reach to 300+ institutions.

While campus recruiting is just one facet of LinkedIn’s talent strategy, students—primarily Millennials and Gen Zers—are an important demographic for the professional network. And LinkedIn is not alone in targeting the future workforce, with an increasing number of organizations looking at how the next generation’s values and principles directly affect how companies view candidate experience, EVP, and employer branding.

Candidates can share their good or bad experiences across their social media networks, which will likely color their perceptions—as well as those in their network—as customers for LinkedIn’s products and services.

“One of the biggest pieces of our culture and values is ‘members first’,” says Campana. “And since every candidate who comes through our door is a member that’s even more important to us—their experience is not just as a candidates, but also as a LinkedIn member.”

The American workforce is becoming increasingly freelance, and Upwork CEO Stephane Kasriel wants to leverage this to establish a new work mentality.  

If data is now our most valuable currency, then time is the greatest commodity. When it takes businesses an average of 32+ days to fill open positions, it’s no stretch to see why companies are delaying, canceling or extending their project workloads. And this comes at great expense. According to Upwork CEO Stephane Kasriel, the competition for high-demand jobs like developers and engineers means talent shortages, multiple rounds of time-consuming interviews, and increased company spending.

Even though traditional hiring depletes company resources, demand remains, and freelancers need to connect with clients who need their skills. To learn more about why companies are foregoing hiring in favor of contracting, we invited Stephane Kasriel to speak at our Hiring Success conference in San Francisco. You can watch his full presentation in the video embedded above, or continue reading for a summary.

Kasriel frames his talk around the historical evolution of work over the last two centuries, beginning with the Industrial Revolution, where labor contracts brought many workers “from farmhouses to factory floors”, which eventually led to the cubicle model of the 1950s, ushering in service jobs that required phones and computers. Over time, these models of work laid the foundation for today’s work landscape, where “technology is removing barriers of traditional hiring models born of the Industrial Era.”

True, many professions today can be accomplished anywhere with a broadband connection, and with the rise of free video conferencing software and flex schedules, Kasriel sees a dwindling need for traditional offices. It’s no secret that an increasing number millennials are embracing the white-collar gig economy, electing to freelance full time, creating opportunity for online platforms like Upwork to address the talent shortage facing many businesses.

According to a recent report from Upwork, three times as many hiring managers felt hiring had gotten harder in 2017 over the previous year, citing issues related to the interview process and hiring costs.

Upwork claims its platform is solving many of these problems by “making online work similar to local work, with added speed, cost, and quality advantages.” Kasriel outlines how improvements to each of these criteria have contributed to making Upwork the world’s largest talent platform, resulting in $1.5 billion GSV per year and 28 percent of its clients on the Fortune 500 list. From developers to lawyers and designers, Upwork covers “over 5000 skills, across a hundred different categories,” says Kasriel. “We are the place where people can find just about any kind of knowledge work that can be done from anywhere in the world.”

And breaking down the borders separating people from work is exactly the kind of messaging Kasriel and his team want to promote, with claims that Upwork can create a new mentality he calls “work without limits”.

“We are at a point today where a lot of people are being left behind,” he says. “We aren’t considering the people who are highly skilled, who want to work really hard, and just happen to be living a couple hundred miles away.”

To that end, Kasriel argues that contracting workers is not only better for businesses, but aligns with the demands of today’s job market and independent professionals. Kasriel predicts that “by 2027, the majority of the US workforce will be freelance,” and points to a study from McKinsey Global Institute, that suggests freelancers could add $2.7 trillion to global GDP over this same period.

The future of freelancing looks promising for online talent platforms like Upwork, especially when validated by companies shifting their talent strategies to include more contract workers. Kasriel says that these companies are seeing results, with 90 percent of hiring managers claiming to be more satisfied with the skills of freelancers than their most recent full-time hire and 80 percent of them reporting increased team productivity thanks to a recent freelance hire.

As more individuals pursue careers as independent professionals, the scale will inevitably tip away from traditional work models, and more companies will evolve their talent strategies in response. In an era where efficiency and cost-cutting are the metrics by which we evaluate business success, for many companies, contracting workers rather than hiring them full time is today’s most convenient solution.

Tech has increasingly become a young person’s hustle, but excluding older workers could be hurting tech companies’ futures.

In Silicon Valley, the median age of employees at titans such as Facebook and Google is under 30 years old. FB founder Mark Zuckerberg and venture capitalist Vinod Khosla opine that “young people are just smarter”, and “people over 45 die in terms of new ideas”. It’s no wonder the demand for “digital natives” is leaving older workers at a disadvantage. While it would be hard to fault such logic, we still have to ask: is big tech’s discrimination against an aging workforce hurting its future self?

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, by 2030, workers aged 55 and older will constitute nearly 30 percent of the American workforce. This will impact cross-sector industries on a global scale—from e-commerce to financial and business services, even manufacturing. “The whole globe is aging,” says Joyce DeMonnin, Communications & Media Relations Director at AARP. “People have longer lifespans and fewer children, but another consideration is that older people are also your customers.”

And as such, it’s time for tech companies to check their ageist bias, from their job ads to their hiring practices. To speak more about identifying and eliminating ageism in the workplace, we invited Joyce DeMonnin from AARP Oregon; Emilia D’Anzica, founder of Customer Growth Advisors; and Scott Hernandez, Global Head of Recruiting at StubHub; to our Hiring Success Conference in San Francisco. You can watch their full presentation in the video embedded above, or read on for a summary of each presenter’s talk.

Joyce DeMonnin, Communications & Media Relations Director at AARP Oregon

Working in education and policy with AARP, Joyce raises awareness of how older workers are often undervalued as employees. Organizations may wonder if older workers are staying relevant or current, but DeMonnin says businesses need to “understand and judge someone on their passion, purpose, and what they can bring to their organization,” and not just see them as out-of-touch or ready for the glue factory.

“Older workers have a lot of knowledge, skill, ability, and talent,” she argues. “They also have lots of connections, they’re great mentors, and stay passionate about being engaged.”

What’s more, businesses that fail to eliminate ageist biases may face legal ramifications under the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA), which protects applicants and employees 40 years or older from discrimination during the hiring process, promotions, and job terminations. As DeMonnin points out, even the language used in job descriptions can be enough to violate the ADEA, making writing analysis tools like Textio invaluable when creating job ads with truly neutral language.

Emilia D’Anzica, Founder at Customer Growth Advisors

Having spent over a decade working in tech, Emilia D’Anzica was shocked to find she was being replaced because company leadership wanted “fresh blood”. Her next task was to select and train her replacement before her unceremonious departure. Rather than give into anger and disappointment, Emilia found a job that enabled her to mentor and inspire other business leaders about biases in the workplace.

“Ageism is a social construct that we can all combat,” she says. “We can work towards changing how people look towards that experience.”

A more holistic approach might be what big tech needs to address the industry’s widening skills gap. “Why would you exclude a workforce that is educated, experienced, and can bring so much to the table,” Emilia asks, “especially as your consumers are getting older?”

Scott Hernandez, Global Head of Recruiting at StubHub

Hernandez sees ageism as a bias recruiters should actively keep in check, looking at experience as “a more holistic skillset.” At StubHub, Hernandez and his team construct the recruiting process around a set of company values—diversity being high on the list—and look to hire candidates the company views as a competitive advantage. “There is a strength in diversity,” says Hernandez. “More unique experience bring more unique ideas bring more unique perspectives and more unique output.”

Most forward-thinking companies would agree, and we’re already seeing a shift in recruiting practices that place more value on experience and skills that will amplify the performance of a team. For StubHub, reflecting the company’s expanded reach and commitment to diversity—including changes to company logos, brand colors, even the typography—is a top priority. When recruiting new talent, Hernandez claims Stubhub “doesn’t constrain itself to the jobs of yesterday, but the needs of tomorrow.”

Unlike other workplace biases that have active communities who rally in support of inclusion, ageism remains largely ignored. While most older workers say they have seen or experienced age discrimination, only 3 percent report having made a formal complaint.

Creating workplace cultures of inclusion didn’t happen overnight, and we’re far from done, which is why we’re revisiting “Ageism in the workplace” at our upcoming Hiring Success Conference in Berlin.

For Emilia D’Anzica, eliminating the ageism bias begins with the question: “Do you hold yourself to your values and your company mission without a bias? That is a question you have to constantly ask yourself, and conferences will refresh your mind and will educate you on the shifting workforce and how you can rewire your biases.”