LinkedIn Adds Corporate Profiles

LinkedIn has become a player in the social networking game by concentrating on offering a connecting point for the busy professional. If you want to connect with people in your industry and network online, LinkedIn has become the place to do it. Without the obnoxious and time consuming games of FaceBook and the hideous page designs of MySpace, LinkedIn is a safe haven for the tech savvy business person.

LinkedIn has been adding features to become a more useful destination for a while now. Over the last few months we've seen them add a Question and Answer section that has proven to be quite popular. In this area users can get help by asking a question, and other users can show their expertise by answering. Then the winning answer gets voted on by the person asking the question, giving that user more clout.

Groups are another recent addition to LinkedIn. The kinks aren't quite worked out yet. You can't search for a group, nor can you see a complete list of available groups. Only the most popular groups show right now, which makes it hard to find what you need. In spite of that handicap, the groups feature is already proving quite popular and helpful.

They also recently added a news feed to the home page. I personally find this annoying, as they did not include a way to opt out of the feed. This means that I'm seeing news from old jobs that I no longer care anything about, cluttering up my home page. I'd probably opt out of a news feed altogether, but I can see where someone working at a large company might find it useful.

That brings us to corporate profiles. Up until now LinkedIn has been focused on the employees, entrepreneurs and freelancers only. They have now added corporate profiles for thousands of major companies. These profiles track everything from jobs in a company to income and employment trends. Offering a variety of helpful information for both existing and potential employees, the new corporate profiles will be a welcome edition to the features of LinkedIn.

A sampling of information found on the corporate profiles:

– Google draws its employees from Microsoft, IBM, Sun Microsystems, Oracle and Yahoo. They mostly go on to jobs at Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook, Cisco Systems and Apple.

– Google hires graduates from Stanford, followed by UC Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon, and 23 percent of its employees are software engineers.

– Common job titles for Yahoo workers are “technical Yahoo,” at 8 percent, and software engineer, also 8 percent.

– At Facebook, 20 percent of employees are software engineers, and Facebook employees are most connected to other employees at Google, VideoEgg, Yahoo and YouTube.

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