Linkedin industries - what are they?

There are currently more than 814 million LinkedIn users worldwide, including more than 4 million from Poland. In order to properly select your target group, simply use the filters available in Sales Navigator. In this article, we will take a closer look at one of them, namely 'industry'.

What are industries on LinkedIn?

When adding a job position in the Experience section, the industry is a mandatory field to complete. LinkedIn does not allow you to enter it manually. You have to select from the 416 positions available in the list. If you do not find your industry on the list, you must select the most similar one. The portal's pre-definition of specific names makes it possible to search for profiles based on the industry in which users currently work.

This makes Sales Navigator a powerful tool for marketers, salespeople and recruiters alike. All names appear in English, for ease of reference we provide a table later in this article with a Polish translation of each name. This is the paid version of access to LinkedIn. There are four plans to choose from within LinkedIn Premium. Sales Navigator allows, among other things, advanced search, as well as customised lists of clients and prospects. These are not all the possibilities it provides.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator helps you to attract regular customers. You can focus on finding the right contacts on LinkedIn - you will build a network of qualified professionals through this. Statistics show that those using the Sales Navigator plan are more effective in terms of bringing about a deal. Of course, the free version of LinkedIn also allows you to search for contacts, but Sales Navigator provides more filters as well as other capabilities.

How do I update my industry with an existing profile on LinkedIn? After logging into your account, click the thumbnail of the profile picture icon at the top of the page and then select View Profile. In the next step, you need to scroll through the page and, next to the Experience list, select the edit option on the right - click the pencil. You can then add or edit an existing experience. If you want to change the information, you also have to click on the pencil icon next to the item. Once the data window has opened, scroll down to the Industry item. There, you can make a change if you have added an incorrect name. Then simply click Save and you are done.

If we have the industry name filled in on LinkedIn, we increase the chance of recruiters reaching out to our profile. Further on, the possible contact is determined by various issues. Any recommendation on LinkedIn, i.e. confirmation by another user of the portal that we have certain skills, is valuable. In addition, it is worth including a profile picture - according to LinkedIn data, this increases the chance of a person's information being found out by 14 times. Visibility in search results is higher for those profiles that are 100% completed. When you log into your account and view information about you, you can see how complete your profile is.

May 2022 update

At the beginning of May 2022, Sales Navigator started updating the list of industries for selected users; by the end of that month, 90% of Sales Navigator owners already had the new list. After the changes, it increased from 149 to 416 items.

As you can see from the numbers available on LinkedIn, it is easy to carry out an analysis of the labour market. Such a cross-section allows you to plan your business strategies for the coming months. The data can be narrowed down using other filters, for example geography, and divided into provinces, counties and cities. Sales Navigator is a mine of knowledge for analysts, recruiters, marketers and all those responsible for business development.

Practical application

Knowing the full list of industries, we can more effectively create sales-marketing or recruitment campaigns. Such offers, more accurately targeted to the professional areas of interest, will yield much better results, allowing us to reach more people interested in our cooperation proposal in a shorter time. Using the Industry filter in the Sales Navigator search engine, we obtain an accurate list of users who have selected a particular industry in their current job posting. It is therefore worth using this option when conducting recruitment processes or selling services aimed at specific professions. When planning your own business, you can also check how much competition there is in the industry in the area you are interested in. With this data, advertising on LinkedIn can be more effective. You can target the industry that is actually interested in your product or service category.

A doubt that may arise for those seeking employees is the question of which social network to conduct the search on. LinkedIn or Goldenline? Which site to choose? Goldenline.pl is a Polish brand and a site that has quite a long history. Over the last decade, however, it has been decisively losing popularity and has been on a similar path to nk.pl. Reportedly, recent months have been better for the site. It has around 3 million users and activity on it is increasing. LinkedIn, on the other hand, is the site that has been growing rapidly and building popularity for a long time. Furthermore, it is an excellent source of leads for the B2B industry. According to a study by Kozminski University, as many as 97 per cent of decision-makers from all industries have a profile on LinkedIn. Therefore, this social network is a very good choice for marketing activities, among others. In addition, it provides access to a multitude of specialists. However, this does not mean that Goldenline should be completely ignored. You may also find the right experts in your sector there.

Here are some relevant statistics which prove that it is worthwhile to have a completed profile on LinkedIn, state your industry and let recruiters find you:

• 49 million users per week search for jobs on LinkedIn.
• Every second, 77 applications are submitted through the portal.
• There are 58 million companies on LinkedIn.
• According to Spectrem, 37 per cent of millionaires have a profile on LinkedIn.
• According to Statista, more than 90 percent of Fortune 500 companies use LinkedIn.
• 75 percent of LinkedIn users who have recently changed jobs used the site for decision-making.
• Employees sourced through LinkedIn are less likely to leave a company within the first six months than those found by other means.
• More than 20,000 companies in the US use LinkedIn for recruitment

LinkedIn - list of industries

Below is the full list of the 416 industries on LinkedIn, along with the number of decision makers in each industry.

For values >1000, LinkedIn gives an approximate number. "Director+" means: directors, partners, board members, owners and vice presidents.