What’s the Persona of Your Company? Examining the LinkedIn Company Directory

Combining both third party plus member data, LinkedIn can reveal a persona –and social capital– of our companies

LinkedIn announces it’s ‘company’ pages (your company is likely there) that displays both status updates of content created by members, as well as pulling in third party data about companies in this unique mashup. The center column displays people in your network, new hires, promotions, and the most viewed profiles.

While I see this as a minor new feature release, it could pave the way to some interesting models on how the intranet is now in public. There are plenty of opportunities to compare across companies, to help both current management of companies understand their workforce, new employees making decisions on which company they want to work at, and ‘outbound’ professionals to scope out prospects.

The sample size
First, remember that the data is only of those who are participating on LinkedIn, don’t assume it’s your entire workforce. What’s interesting is that for many employees, this is the first time they’ve ever been able to see the majority of job titles on LinkedIn, tenure, and other data that is typically held tight (or non-existent) by HR.

Retention Rate (at tech companies)
People leaving too soon can quickly add up to major costs. It’s safe to say that those that are active on LinkedIn are highly networked, have high social connections, and are more likely to be mobile

Regarding tenure, or really, ‘retention rate’ of the employees I found the following interesting

Hitachi, 3.5 years
Oracle 3 years
IBM 3 years
Microsoft 2.5 years
Yahoo 2 years
Apple 2 years
Google, 1.5 years
Facebook, 1 year

Update: Louis Gray has taken this to another level, I planned on doing this, but didn’t have the time, great job.

Roles and Education
It was interesting (yet not surprising) to confirm that a majority of Facebook’s employees on LinkedIn were engineers: 26% and 10% are from Stanford, and 6% from Berkeley, with a medium age of a mere 27.

At Google, which prides itself in it’s marketing prowess also has 23% SW engineers, with a medium ripe age of 29

Expand on this Platform: My Wishlist
Some interesting features I’d like to see from this company directory could include:

Creating job satisfaction ratings for previous and current jobs (help determine who likes to work where)

How connected is the average company? A more connected company is likely to have more relationships, clients, and partners

Creating a company directory, at least at the executive level (consumer created org charts)

Show which one of the employees is the most connected (interesting for sales and recruiters)

Average years of working experience per employee per company (determine maturity or youth of company)

What’s the average connections per employee per company (help determine social capital)

Industry comparisons between highest educated, longest tenure, etc.

Create a heat map that shows where employees are located

Which companies hired the most per college rate (example: Stanford students has strong affinity to Facebook, etc)

There’s an opportunity here for this platform to expand and offer more data about a companies persona, and how it relates to the rest of the market. I look forward to future iterations and improvements.

Update: thanks Brian Keith for the typo alert

This entry was posted on Friday, March 21st, 2008 at 4:59 am and is filed under Social Media, Web Industry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.