LinkedIn adds corporate data

As you may have seen, last Friday LinkedIn added a new feature to its site. There are now profiles on the businesses that LinkedIn users work for, aggregated by all of the users who have identified themselves as employees of those companies.

Ben Worthen of the Wall Street Journal highlighted this new feature in a recent blog post. Ben briefly discusses the fact that some of the data that is shared may not be comfortable for the companies because they don't have any control over the information. Data such as recent promotions and new hires as well as already public information like revenue and location are featured on each company's profile page.

As an HR person who loves to use LinkedIn to find people as well as to stay connected with people I already know, I find myself both loving this new information as well as understanding the discomfort it creates. I quickly realized that there are several people who still have the company I work for listed as their current employer, although they have been gone for several years. This disrupts not only the accuracy of who is linked to the organization, but also skews the data on demographics. In the end, is that a big deal? Maybe not. It creates and interesting situation, however. Do you contact those folks and ask them to update their profiles? Is it worth the time and hassle?

In the end, I love disruptive technologies and think that the challenges they offer us make us better. I'm curious, though, how other companies are seeing this. What other challenges might this and other changes like it present and how do we work WITH the disruptions instead of fight AGAINST them?


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Comments

[Almostgotit]

Hey Kris: Thanks for visiting my blog! Yeah, we're having a "wake up" employment moment at our house too.

Your post points out a very interesting problem with technology: we have yet to realize that it isn't magic and won't do quite ALL of our work for us (as in: you still have to UPDATE the information on sites such as LinkedIn, otherwise it is actually WORSE than posting no information at all.) I develop websites for (part of) my living, and this is a perennial problem... people may be willing to do the work and shell out the money to get a website up and running, but don't realize that the harder work is actually keeping it up to date. And there just are few things worse than a website that is still headlining a November 2006 "upcoming" event. I mean, EGADS! What does that say about your organization?

Yep, Technology is great -- except when it isn't.