The Engineering Component of LinkedIn Company Profiles
Over the course of the last years there were several important features that we've brought to you. The past few months in particular has seen the rapid deployment of features such as these: Profile photos, Redesigned Homepage, etc... We also enabled better communication within your professional network with the introduction of LinkedIn Status, one-to-one messaging, robust network updates, etc...
Today, I'm here to blog about a completely new product offering, a radically new way you can use LinkedIn for your business. Today, LinkedIn introduced Company Profiles, a new research tool that helps you find and explore companies that you might want to work for or do business with. Maisy Samuelson, my colleague from the product side, has blogged a quick video demo, which you should take a look at here.
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Company Profiles are literally profiles for companies. From an engineering perspective, we started with a relatively simple prototype of recent promotions and hires, iterated and created static pages for several companies. We then launched our company standardization project, played with massive amounts of statistical data, improved our search engine, added analytical data platform, ran a whole bunch of SQL scripts and implemented several designs of a page - Phew! All in a day's work! And here's what the page looks like now, with all the bricks in place:
Most of the information we've surfaced in this beta iteration of Company Profiles is unique data you'd find valuable for anyone interested in researching, working with or working for a company.
From the initial concept till the public release it has been a long yet fun ride. And at the same time it's just the start. Stay tuned - in the coming months we'll be expanding company profiles to allow you to search for companies by location, industry, size, type and many more. Feel free to leave a comment or check out Maisy's video demo on company profiles.