A free Service is being provided by LinkedIn in order to pair mentors and users

LinkedIn, the Microsoft-owned social network for the working world with over 500 million users, has put a lot of effort into new areas of business like content, education and bringing on new users in emerging markets; but today it’s embarking on the roll out of a new service that plays squarely into the bread and butter of its business: looking for work.

Today, the company is debuting a new service that identifies potential mentors and people who might be looking for mentorship in a specific area, and then helps match them to each other. The service (which started with a small test last month) is free and will be available first to users in San Francisco and Australia, Hari Srinivasan, Head of Identity Products at LinkedIn, tells.

Initially, LinkedIn has drawn on a list of possible mentors, who will be there as a list, Tinder-style, to the people who show that they are willing to get mentored, so that a right match can be made. Mentors are provided with choices about who would they prefer to mentor, whether the people in their networks or region or their former school. Srinivasan said that with time, the option will be open to everyone for becoming a mentor, which even makes sense as we all can learn something from everyone.

On the side of mentee, after indicating that you are willing to get some advice or feedback regarding a particular topic, LinkedIn will then provide you your own possible parameters to narrow down your hunt (initially these are if you want nearby people, or from your alma mater), or if you want a list of potential mentors which is as wide as the user base of LinkedIn.

Once the match is done, you can message each other, and anyone of you can stop the communication at any point.

LinkedIn is trying to tap into the gap which is there in the market: career mentoring is a simple thing to have when you happen to have someone in the same field as you are, either by working with them or knowing him or her through various available channels. It’s harder if you haven’t found that person, or if you are thinking of something like a career change.

Career coaching services are available— like, start-ups BetterUp and Everwise — but they come at a price as these are a more formal. Out of Office Hours in Silicon Valley, created out of a ‘give something back’ effort during a holiday period, focuses on tech careers. LinkedIn’s service is free (for now), and has the possibility to cover as many jobs as there are people using the platform.

LinkedIn will have some obvious benefits with a launch of a service like this. It will provide the company with one more service to increase engagement on their platform, and the new engagement effort relates directly to how most people tend to use LinkedIn already.

It’s also a continuation into using various other services on LinkedIn, including job searches; additional training (via Lynda.com or LinkedIn Learning); and paying for a more tradition career coach that can be founded through ProFinder, LinkedIn’s freelancer marketplace, where LinkedIn tells that career coaching is “one of the most sought after categories on the platform.”