8 Ways Job Hunters Can Use LinkedIn's Company Profiles

One of the best job hunting resources just launched on LinkedIn: company profiles (thanks to the LinkedIn blog and Jeremiah for the heads up). It tells you so much information about potential employers that it can make your job research so much more productive. Here are seven ways to do it.

1. Check out the parent or subsidiary company, if applicable. Understand where a company fits in within the corporate hierarchy. Research them, and pay attention to similarities and differences. Consider applying to one of the other companies if it’s a better fit, if you know someone better at another, or for any other reason.
2. See where people go before and after. It’s not a perfect sample, as this only represents what people declare in LinkedIn, but the sample size is tremendous for many industries now. You can also see if you have friends at one of these other companies to see if they have any thoughts on why people are going to or from there, and you can also try to understand why there’s a connection (eg an agency may be feeding lots of talent to a major publisher they do business with, or many of the people who came from another agency actually arrived via an acquisition).
3. Research the top locations. Would you be willing to relocate? If so, they may have different needs in different offices, or they may be trying to relocate some of their existing staff already. Use your flexibility as another asset.
4. View the popular profiles and Google them. They may be influential in the company or the industry, so whether or not you interview with them, you’ll gain points dropping names that you saw them quoted, speaking at an event, or doing a drunken holiday party dance on YouTube.
5. View the common job titles. If you’re open to such a position, whether or not they’re hiring, it means there are more likely to be openings in that area.
6. Did you go to any of the top schools they hire from? Run an advanced search to see which people went there just in case you can meet them, name drop, or make a reference to a college sports team rivalry.
7. Consider employees’ ages, median tenure, and common job titles, but the LinkedIn sample size, age of the company, and industry can all be major factors influencing this. Other suggestions on this list are more universal.
8. For singles, check out the gender split and median age. If they’re young and disproportionately your preferred gender for dating, consider the job perks. If you’re into younger women, consider a career in PR where you can choose from Burson-Marsteller (65% female, average age 29), Weber Shandwick (64%, 29), Porter Novelli (67%, 31), Edelman (65%, 29), Fleishman-Hillard (65%, 30), Hill & Knowlton (63%, 30), or Ogilvy PR (65%, 30).

Two postscripts:

1. If you’re considering new opportunities, send your resume my way at dberkowitz [at] 360i [dot] com as 360i (my employer, albeit unaffiliated with this blog) is always looking for the best folks in the business to join in a number of roles. The fact that you’re reading this blog means you must be brilliant, or you have brilliant friends who forwarded this to you. See our openings in New York and Atlanta.
2. Now that all of 360i‘s senior management will see this post in the news alerts, I’ll note publicly I’m not using LinkedIn in any of the ways described above, though the company pages do fascinate me for corporate stalking.