What to expect, what they’re really testing, and what a strong answer looks like — scored.
Professional graph, job seeker and recruiter experience, feed engagement quality, and B2B monetization through Recruiter and Sales Navigator. LinkedIn PMs must balance the needs of job seekers, employed professionals, and enterprise buyers.
The question below was asked by LinkedIn interviewers. The answer is graded on the five dimensions real PM interviewers use: structure, specificity, reasoning, decision quality, and delivery.
“How would you improve LinkedIn's feed for professionals who are not actively job searching?”
The core problem with LinkedIn's feed for non-job-seekers is signal pollution: the feed is dominated by job posts, recruiter reach-outs, and engagement-bait posts ('I was laid off and found this to be a blessing...') that don't serve the needs of someone who is happily employed. These users have a different value proposition — they want professional knowledge, industry signals, and peer credibility — and the feed doesn't serve them.
I'd segment non-job-seeking users into two sub-groups: professionals who engage with content (readers/posters) and professionals who only log in to accept connection requests or view notifications. The second group is at risk of churning out of habit, which erodes LinkedIn's network value.
For the content-engaging sub-group, I'd focus on increasing feed signal quality: filter posts by professional relevance, not engagement. A viral post about overcoming layoffs is high-engagement but low-relevance to a senior engineer who is well-employed. LinkedIn should surface posts from people in the user's industry, at similar seniority levels, on topics they've historically engaged with — not whatever is going viral.
Concrete feature: a 'Professional Digest' tab that aggregates the 10 most relevant posts from the user's industry network in the past 48 hours, ranked by semantic relevance to their job function, not by likes. This gives content readers a reason to check LinkedIn without enduring the noise of the main feed.
Success metric: weekly active return rate for non-job-seeking users (primary). Guardrail: don't reduce overall feed likes/comments, since that would hurt LinkedIn's content creator ecosystem.
Identifies the core problem (signal pollution), segments the user group, and proposes a differentiated solution for each.
Names the specific content type polluting the feed (viral layoff posts) and a concrete alternative (Professional Digest with semantic ranking).
The 'engagement ≠ relevance' insight is the right diagnosis for LinkedIn's content quality problem.
The Professional Digest idea is good but the answer doesn't fully commit to it as the top priority versus other interventions.
Clear and well-paced; the viral layoff post example is memorable.
The 'engagement ≠ relevance' reframe is the answer's core strength — it correctly diagnoses why the LinkedIn feed feels noisy to employed professionals. The Professional Digest idea is concrete and differentiated. The weakness is that the answer could be stronger on why this would help LinkedIn's business, not just user experience. A tab that fewer users scroll through might reduce ad impressions, and the answer doesn't address this tradeoff.
Add one sentence on the business case — for example, that higher-quality engaged users generate more Recruiter and premium upsells, which offsets any reduction in feed ad impressions.
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