People @ Work

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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Video Recruiting

Recently, a colleague of mine alerted me to an interesting way of recruiting. Union Square Ventures has had success with this method before and is trying it again. What they are doing is posting the job as a blog entry on the corporate blog and asking applicants to apply by leaving a comment on the post with a link to their web presence.

While this seems like a cool new way to attract candidates who are using Web 2.0 technologies, How does it play in the legal world where being able to see the candidate's gender, ethnicity, age and/or visible disabilities before they even get to present their credentials? Will we ever get comfortable with this kind of approach? I think that it will be quite a while before the HR world embraces this new "application process." However, I love what it does from a branding perspective and would hate to miss out on some interesting opportunities for fear of being "uncomfortable."