Dubai: LinkedIn, the largest professional networking website, is investing more in Dubai as the regional headquarters for the Middle East and North Africa is continuing to attract the highest percentage of talent inflow.

LinkedIn opened its Dubai office in October 2012 at Dubai Internet City.

In October 2012, LinkedIn had five million users but it has mushroomed to 13 million users now, of which more than one million are from the UAE. A majority are free (non-subscription) members.

“We expect the growth to continue as we see huge opportunities for monetisation in the region. The region is one of the fastest growing markets in the world. The economies are very strong and value proposition of the members are really resonating and we have a great team in Dubai. We see more investment coming,” Mike Gamson, senior vice-president of international business at LinkedIn, told Gulf News in an exclusive interview.

But he did not disclose how much LinkedIn is going to invest.

The company is moving to a new location as the number of staff is increasing. It now has 50 staff at its Dubai office compared to a handful in 2012.

LinkedIn has no plans to open new offices globally but the platform is expected to register faster growth in regions like “China, Brazil, India and the Middle East,” he said.

“Our strategy is primarily to continue as we are going today. We have been primarily focused on helping companies hire and market. In the near future, we will be building teams to help companies sell in a social-selling method and that will be a big part of our strategy,” he said.

Gamson sees the challenges and opportunities in the region similar to rest of the world. The first is that we need to make our product “easy to understand” for everyone. For the last couple of years, he said that LinkedIn built a lot of value proposition to the platform and now “we need to invest in to make it simple to discover”.

“We see few technical people in this part of the world, same as in other parts, so there will be a huge inflow of talents into Dubai,” he said.

According to LinkedIn, UAE saw the most talent coming into the country with the majority of members coming from India. Spain, which has been facing tough economic conditions, saw the most talent leaving the country, with the majority of members leaving for the UK.

“We noticed that 75 per cent of the members who moved to the UAE came from outside of the Middle East,” Gamson said.