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.
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.
christina tierney Mar 21, 2008
Would like to know if the profile pic and stats could be moved to a more prominent position on the page. I have to scroll below fold to see what members are doing...find this somewhat cumbersome. Would prefer to know immediately what's up with my peeps!
Mike Reynolds Mar 21, 2008
Where are these profiles found?
Matt Browne Mar 21, 2008
I this feature. One of my colleagues was asking me what LinkedIn 'had for companies'- and this is exactly what I had mind. Great execution.
Jeremiah posted some pretty good suggestions here:
http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2008/03/21/whats-the-persona-of-your-company-linkedin-company-directory/
But if I may make one of my own suggestions; I can see how this might raise some privacy concerns from some businesses. The information was always accessible, but it wasn’t aggregated or centralized to this extent. I could see scenarios where businesses want more control over who can see what specific data.
My suggestion to your team would be to consider a feature similar to Facebook where you can remove certain news events from your public time-line.
This will help create an environment that gives businesses more trust and confidence in the system and supports their recruiting needs. Otherwise, social media innovations like this will continue to scare traditionalists that have trouble embracing open-ness.
Todd Mar 21, 2008
Great feature! How do we fix bugs in the profile though? Mine reflects our old stealth company name, yet everyone updated their profiles months ago!
Vishal Sharma Mar 21, 2008
Thats a welcome move, i wonder how the recruitment agencies and HR dertmnt will use this now. Recent developments are really good
Vishal Sharma Mar 21, 2008
Thats a welcome move, i wonder how the recruitment agencies and HR department will use this now. Recent developments are really good
Mark Frisk Mar 21, 2008
And this feature will roll out when?
I don't see any company profiles, not even for LinkedIn. No little icons next to company names.
Nataliya Yakushev Mar 21, 2008
What to do if your company is not there? How do I add my company to the directory?
Kawika Holbrook Mar 21, 2008
Perhaps I'm missing it, but where do you add a company that isn't listed? Half our employees belong to LinkedIn but our firm is MIA. Also missing (for just now, I'm sure), is the ability to search by company in the pull-down menu at the top right-hand portion of the home page. Thanks.
Danis Mar 21, 2008
Guys, thanks for the feedback.
@Christina
Company Profiles product is still in beta mode. We'll be collecting feedbacks and working on improvements in the coming weeks/months.
@Mike
@Mark
Company Profiles went public yesterday. Currently you can find the links to company profiles on member profiles close to a company name in the Experience section (check for little icon) or in your network updates feed. Later we'll add more links on the site. Also when you land on a company profile (ex. LinkedIn) you can search for other companies using company search bar.
@Matt
Thanks, good to know that people like what we did. Jeremiah's comments are definitely interesting and you have a very good concern about visibility & privacy. Currently we have a setting which allows member to control profile & status updates. This setting is used to generate data for several modules. In a next couple of weeks we may extend existing privacy setting (or add new ones) if privacy issue will start raising.
Danis Mar 21, 2008
@Todd
Thanks, we are constantly working on company identification for member positions. My suggestion for you is to edit your position and select company you currently work for from the list of suggested companies. Or you may add new position if you want.
@Vishal
Appreciate you feedback. We are sure this tool will be extremely valuable for recruiters.
@Kawika
@Nataliya
Company directory is a work-in-progress project. We are adding new companies almost every week. If there is no company in our company directory which you want to put in your profile you can just skip the selection and free-type company name in Add/Edit position form. We then process all the suggested companies and add them to our company directory.
Thanks all,
--Danis
Phil Rosenberg Mar 22, 2008
How do I create a profile of my small company? I don't find the links to get to it.
Peter Ikladious Apr 2, 2008
The company profiles are a great idea. I'm sure, over time, more information will continue to be included to make it an even more powerful tool.
I noticed a couple of things that I would hope you could address about them:
1. There are times when companies appear under different names. For example, one company I worked for is listed as either Hutchison Telecom, Hutchison Telecomms, Hutchison Telecommunications, Hutchison 3G Australia and a few others. There should be a way (ideally) to be able to identify these all as the same company. Alternately, there could be a way to allow users to tag 2 company names as belonging to the same company.
2. I also noticed in one case that a company had an incorrect "parent company" specified (in this case, it specified that the parent of "Hutchison Telecoms" was Ericsson). There was no way to tag this as incorrect. In actual fact, the parent is supposed to be Hutchison Whampoa Limited. There should be a way to tag incorrect data (or correctly mine it in the first place!!).
Thanks and keep up the great work!
Danis Apr 2, 2008
@Phil
Currently we don't have such functionality. We are going to introduce Add/Suggest company feature in a next several months. Initially LI member will need to contact our CS agent and send details about a company. Later this feature will be introduced on the main site. It's coming.
Danis Apr 2, 2008
Peter,
Thanks for your feedback. Currently we are working on improving the accuracy of our company profiles. We know that there is a number of duplicates in our company directory and some company relationships are not true. In a very near future our users will be able to add/edit companies, tag them, add/delete relationships, etc.
Anuj Kacker May 7, 2008
Great Feature!
Please introduce a search feature right on the home page.
Cheers
Anuj