Organization Name: Linked In (from an article in ‘The Economist” Magazine, March 10, 2012, page 78)
Industry: Social Networks
Web references: http://www.linkedin.com/
Description of how social media is used for business performance:
Official statistics can tell you how many workers were jobless last month, how many had college degrees and how many worked in construction. But they cannot tell you how many possess specific pieces of knowledge or specific skills or competencies. LinkedIn, however, says it knows that, and much else gleaned from the profiles of its millions of members. For instance, the social media website for professionals can tell you the fastest growing and fastest shrinking job titles in America. Researchers already mine the internet for hits about disease outbreaks, the national mood or inflation. LinkedIn thinks its data can do the same for the job market. It has more than 150m members worldwide, 60m of them in America. That should be enough to draw accurate inferences about the American workforce.
LinkedIn can potentially track such changes in real time, rather than the weeks or months government surveys take. It can also follow occupations and industries such as e-learning, that don’t have their own category in government tallies. It can trace shifts between regions, sectors and occupations. Are people quitting law firms to become law professors, moving from Arizona to North Dakota, or what?
Lessons for others:
LinkedIn hopes to be able to track the nation’s evolving skills base. Members routinely pick up new skills and add them to their profile. LinkedIn can see how often job changers mention a particular skill. Jeff Weiner, the firm’s boss imagines that eventually every job opening and its requisite skills will be digitally searchable by every potential candidate, reducing the friction that lets millions of vacancies co-exist with high unemployment.
Submitted By: Gerry Call (abridged from an article in ‘The Economist” Magazine, March 10, 2012, page 78)
To contact the author of this entry please email at: gerrycall018@gmail.com
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