LinkedIn’s new app “Lookup” can help co-workers quickly understand who else in the business has what skills, but does encouraging employees to keep their public profiles up-to-date make them more attractive to being poached?
It’s really annoying when people say things like “oh yea, I basically came up with the concept of Facebook, but I just never got round to doing it.” So I’ll go as far as saying I think LinkedIn’s new(ish) app “Lookup” is a really good idea…
In all seriousness, I’ve always thought that big organisations really struggle to help their their employees understand who else in the business knows how to do the thing they’re trying to do. I’ve worked with some big “knowledge sharing” platforms back in the day when we spoke of Web 2.0, and the user experience wasn’t the greatest.
Even today, large organisations can struggle to keep an up-to-date view of their people’s skills and experiences. Often employees are encouraged to update their own profiles, but it can become one of those tasks that keeps getting pushed to the bottom of the to-do list, until end of year appraisals come round. Taking an interface that employees are familiar with (and probably update in their personal time anyway) is rather handy.
But it also opens up a bit of a paradox. You want your employees to have a comprehensive profile, so:
- you and new employees can see what each other look like (we’ve all sent in a last minute mugshot before an away-day, right?);
- you can understand training gaps across the business;
- you can help co-workers benefit from each other’s experience.
But at the same time, all this rich data makes these employees more desirable to recruiters – perhaps a bit of a cynical view, but a consideration all the same.
It will be interesting to see how/if the platform develops over time, and whether different features will launch for “external” and “internal” profiles (as it currently does for contact details).
Are you using Lookup? What do you think of it?