Identified Hires Key Product Manager from LinkedIn and Expands Team to Accommodate Rapid Growth

Identified Hires Key Product Manager from LinkedIn and Expands Team to Accommodate Rapid Growth »

SAN FRANCISCO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Identified, the largest professional database on Facebook, announced the hire of Janet Ryu, a key product manager at LinkedIn (LNKD) who managed two of its most popular features, People You May Know and Who’s Viewed Your Profile. In just two months, Identified has become one of the largest professional databases in the world with 70 million professionals and is widely considered an alternative to LinkedIn. Janet is one of over ten high-profile hires that Identified has made recently to accommodate its rapid growth.

“We’re thrilled to have Janet on our team. She brings with her tremendous experience in professional networking product design,” Identified co-founder Brendan Wallace said. “The two features she spearheaded at LinkedIn accounted for a huge portion of LinkedIn’s activity and engagement. We’re improving on those features every day at Identified.”

Identified, which gives professionals an Identified Score to measure how in-demand their professional background is to companies right now, based a large part of its early development on these two features at LinkedIn. Janet studied engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and previously worked at search engine start-up searchme before joining LinkedIn.

Identified has grown tremendously since launching its beta product on September 20th. Identified allows users to see their Identified Score, a measure of how in-demand their professional background is to companies on a scale of 1 to 100, and improve that score by adding more professional information about themselves.

Identified co-founder Adeyemi Ajao added: “We could not have anticipated the exponential growth we’re seeing. We doubled our user base in the last 15 days, and there are days when we grow by nearly five percent per day. We’re growing our engineering team dramatically to scale with the tremendous traffic we’re seeing every day.”

Because of its massive growth, Identified made another high-profile hire in architecture and scalability expert Vladimir Giverts, who has joined the company as CTO. Giverts previously helped scale social network Tagged to over 100 million users before helping create Lionside, a gaming startup sold to ngmoco in June. In addition, Identified has hired key team members including Rui Li, software engineer and infrastructure specialist at Facebook and Erik Kostelnik, director of sales at Career Builder.

Since its September launch, the Identified Scores of nearly 12 million professionals have been viewed on Identified. The company has plans to build an API to allow hundreds of companies instant access to the Identified Scores of millions of job candidates.

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By Tim Spagnola