LinkedIn - More Than Just Jobs

I don't have an article to share here, though I imagine this has been written about somewhere. All of us are likely familiar with LinkedIn and its potential as a great tool while searching for summer internships, looking for post-Fletcher full time jobs, or just trying to figure out what it is you really want to do in life! And many of use are probably aware that companies and headhunters are using LinkedIn a lot these days to find talent and recruit people.

But LinkedIn can also be a valuable source of information to competitors or adversaries. I was talking with a friend in the private sector a few days ago and he was in the middle of a conference on competitive intelligence - essentially information about competitors that businesses use to guide strategic decision and gain a leg up on their rivals. One extremely valuable source of competitive intelligence is via LinkedIn! Since employees are regularly posting their company affiliation and job titles publicly, anyone with a few minutes to spare can come up with a rough sketch of how a particular company (a competitor) is structured, how it operates, and how many people it has (and whether its hiring or firing a lot recently!). This picture will probably be more detailed than what is on their corporate website.

Furthermore, individuals have an incentive to publish more information beyond that - information on projects they completed, who they manage, what functional or regional lines they are responsible for, etc. All this information makes them look better overall so they partly share out of vanity, but it also makes them a more attractive candidate for other employers seeking new talent, or headhunters looking for smart, accomplished people. But by disclosing these details on a public forum, competitors can gather it, assemble it, and start to forecast what strategic changes their competitor is making and which directions it is heading in - very valuable insight in a highly competitive market. For example, Apple just released an iPhone with a new processor that was designed in-house, the first time that they didn't rely on an external vendor. Apple would never broadcast their strategy ahead of time, but its possible that you could have predicted this move by noticing that many computer engineers at processor design companies had recently changed their jobs via LinkedIn, say from Intel to Apple. [Just a hypothetical example - Apple is secretive enough that it probably took steps to make sure no one saw it coming!]

There are limitations of course, since some employees may not share much beyond title and company, or may not be on LinkedIn at all. And companies are starting to realize that seemingly benign information sharing by employees on "professional" social media like LinkedIn could have adverse consequences - and thus they are revamping their social media policies to reflect these concerns. Finally, LinkedIn has started to restrict access to user profiles based on degrees of separation. It does this not out of privacy concerns, but more of monetization - if you pay, you can look at all the 3rd degree connections you want! But a helpful hint - as of now at least, if you can't see a 3rd degree connection's details, just Google them and then view the cached page... all the details will show up in the archived version of the page.