“Relationships Matter” has been a LinkedIn mantra since our founding but that philosophy has gained relevance in today’s economic scenario. Everyone knows that a referral or introduction is the best way to get your foot in the door at your dream company. If you were hoping to find out who your common connections are at the hiring company, your wait is over. You can now unravel your line of connection with individuals working at the company while you browse LinkedIn’s company profiles.

Here are two ways to do that:

1. Research companies

One of the recent features we announced is the ability to search for “Companies in your network“. What this shows is a list of companies sorted by degrees of separation from you. So, being first degree connections with a company means you’re connected directly to someone at the company. And, second degree means your first degree connections know someone at the company. Also to simplify your job hunt, each of those companies are listed alongside the number of job openings at the company.

2. Research individuals at companies

Company profiles can also serve as your research dashboard on any company and is of particular significance if you’ve applied for a job there. For e.g. the “Current employees” tab shows you those who work at the respective company sorted by degrees away from you, yet again helping you make the right connections at those companies. And, if they are your second degree connections it shows you who your common connections are, which then allows you to ask them for a referral. More important would be the ability to find common connections with your hiring manager that you can access as you navigate the Job Search results.

Research Companies in your network on LinkedIn

Fundamentally, the Internet is about connecting people to information. Every business needs to connect with partners, customers and potential recruits to succeed. Starting this Thursday, we’ve made portions of our company profiles accessible to search engines–this way, when you search for ‘Houston medical device companies’ or ‘Open Geophysical’, you’ll now find information at your fingertips with LinkedIn company profiles in your search results.

Technically, it’s pretty simple:

•    Allow anonymous access to our company profiles
•    Provide friendly URLs, e.g.: http://www.linkedin.com/companies/paypal

As a regular LinkedIn user, when you follow any link to a company, you will see the usual company profile page, customized for you.  For anonymous access (anyone who is not signed in) we changed the layout a bit.

Take a look: Amazon, NVIDIA, Intel (make sure you’re signed out).

We’ve got over 160,000 company profiles, which anyone can now link to, find in web search results (google: eBay), run through a translator (Yahoo! in German), etc..  These company public profiles are densely linked both with each other and with our member public profiles, making for a pretty substantial web of publicly available data.

Check out our directory of companies to make sure your company’s profile is up-to-date. If we don’t have a profile for your company, add it here.

Send us your feedback and any ideas you have for how we can help companies better express themselves.

Since we announced Company Profiles, we’ve received tons of requests from LinkedIn users requesting to create a profile for their company.  Now you can. Company Profiles are an important research and marketing tool for your business that can help potential customers, clients and employees learn more about your company and the people who work there.

Here’s how to create a profile for your company

Step 1: Enter your company name and your email address. This ensures that you are a current employee of this company and that your company doesn’t already have a profile.

Step 2: Once your email has been verified, you can provide basic information about your company.

Step 3: Now when you have a skeleton of your company profile it’s time to provide more data about your company. Add location and related companies. Spice it up with logo. Editing a company profile is as easy as the above 2 steps. What’s better is that your colleagues from the company can also edit the information once they’re identified as belonging to a specific company group.

Our resident genius developed pretty amazing algorithms and we’ll be able to add interesting and unique stats data as soon as more people will be connected to this company.

So, what are you waiting for? Check out your company profile on LinkedIn (http://www.linkedin.com/companies). And if you can’t find your company profile, add it here.

Add your own Company’s profile on LinkedIn

See also:

Introducing Company Directory & Search