If you’re part of a large company, finding all your coworkers online can be tough. Sure, you could turn to the company intranet, but that was designed in 1999 and only half the people have pictures on their page. Or you could turn to Google, but good luck finding anyone with a common last name. But with LinkedIn Lookup, you can quickly find info about your co-workers on LinkedIn.
Designed by the team that built Pulse, which LinkedIn acquired in 2013, the iOS and web app lets users look up coworkers by name, title, skills or experience, even if they’re not connected on the business-focused social network.
Users have to sign up with a company email address (yourname@yourcompany.com) and then they can see and connect with anyone else in the company.
For example, if you’re looking to build a team to track social media engagement, you could look for employees with social media managing backgrounds. Or if you’re having trouble creating an image for your company newsletter, you can search for coworkers with Photoshop skills. Or maybe it was just that guy you were talking to at the coffee machine whose name you can never remember but you know is the marketing manager.
Users can contact coworkers from the app via work email or phone number if listed on their profiles. Users can also send messages within the app, keeping conversations mobile without having to exchange phone numbers.
“About 30 percent of [LinkedIn users] who search for people on LinkedIn each month view their coworkers’ profiles,” LinkedIn product lead Ankit Gupta said in a blog post introducing the new app. “I began to worry more about our employees not knowing each other, and not knowing what everyone else was working on.”
The company surveyed workers across the U.S. and found that less than 40 percent of company intranets actually helped employees find coworkers, especially because people don’t always update their intranet profile when they learn a new skill or even get promoted. Nearly 60 percent of users said they could do their jobs better if they could find coworkers with specific skills.
However, people are much more likely to keep their LinkedIn profile up to date. Not only is a LinkedIn profile pretty easy to update, but it could help with job prospects down the road.
LinkedIn has always been a good way to keep up with coworkers’ current assignments, and with LinkedIn Lookup, finding the profile you’re looking for is even easier.
