Linkedin Blog

The LinkedIn Analytics team has been hard at work finding new ways to help you leverage your network and connect you to resources that can enhance your career. Some of our other features include People You May Know and Who’s Viewed My Profile.

Today we’re introducing a new module to help you find groups you might like to join. We’ve recently deployed enhanced group functionality, and many of you have already joined the lively discussions in your groups. The “Groups You Might Like”  module will help you find alumni groups from your schools and previous companies, as well as groups that similar professionals have found valuable.

If you’ve never been pursued by a carnivorous predator in the workplace, you’ve probably never stressed in the way Mother Nature intended. Instead of stressing about immediate survival, professionals stress over deadlines, job security and the economy — not the kind of life-threatening moments stress can help resolve. As Dr. Robert Sapolsky tells it, humans constantly turn on stress responses for the wrong reasons, and it’s killing us.

Sapolsky’s National Geographic special, “Stress: Portrait of a Killer,” airs nationwide Wednesday night on PBS. The special explores what 30 years of baboon research have taught Robert about stress, and how humans have a knack for turning psychological dis-ease into physical disease. We had a rare chance to sit down with Robert and sought to apply his groundbreaking research to the common office primate.

Recently in a LinkedIn LED hack day, I got a chance to play around with data to analyze the social graph. In order to compute some results in real-time, I needed an efficient way to find the shortest path between two nodes in a graph and Dijkstra’s algorithm came to mind.

Dijkstra’s algorithm is a graph search algorithm that solves the single-source shortest path problem for a graph with non negative edge path costs, outputting a shortest path tree. This algorithm is often used in routing. –Wikipedia

Parsing the significance of an incoming business inquiry can be tough. In the case of Jeffrey Taylor, he passed off a lead — who found him on LinkedIn — to the patent department, telling them, “Don’t spend all that much time with this person — this is not a billable hour.” When the patent rep returned two hours later, he let Jeffrey know, “They just gave us $250,000 worth of patent work!” Ostensibly the contract covered the hours required for the phone call.

“I’ll get calls from Singapore or Malaysia,” Jeffrey said, pointing to the international utility of LinkedIn. As one of his recommendations notes, “My company, based in Europe, uses Jeff and his firm as our primary bridge to the U.S. government.” Jeffrey’s profile enables people with PR needs to find him in Washington — and it enables him to reach out to other companies who may need representation in the nation’s capitol. Following his $250K revelation on LinkedIn, Jeffrey made it a point to expand his network to encourage incoming opportunities.