I click on Julie’s profile and Lookup gives me the info that is most relevant to me: her photo, title, work experience, education, top skills, and work email address. Lookup provides me with the photos, names, and titles of my coworkers whose LinkedIn profiles include the skill or title “corporate communications.” There she is: Julie. Since she works on our corporate communications team, I enter “Corporate Communications” in the search field, and click “search.” No problem! With Lookup I can search for coworkers by name, title, current and past experience, education, and skills. Let’s say I recently met a person on our corporate communications team whose input I’d like on a product I’m developing, but I can’t remember her name. That’s because it’s easier to find coworkers on LinkedIn, and the professional info people add to their profiles is more comprehensive and up-to-date than lots of companies’ intranets.

46 percent say they look up coworkers on LinkedIn. In response, people are looking elsewhere to learn about their coworkers. 58 percent said they could do a better job if they could find coworkers with specific skills. Only 38 percent of professionals said their companies’ intranets are effective at helping them learn about their coworkers. We wanted to find out why, so later that month we surveyed 814 professionals in North America about how they use their companies’ intranets. We discovered in April that about 30 percent of members who search for people on LinkedIn each month view their coworkers’ profiles. That’s why I’m excited to introduce you to LinkedIn Lookup - a new LinkedIn app that makes professionals more productive and successful by helping them easily find, learn about, and contact their coworkers.

And I was concerned about the impact this could have on our culture and productivity. But as our team grew, I began to worry more about our employees not knowing each other, and not knowing what everyone else was working on. We knew each other well, and of course we knew what the other was working on. When I co-founded Pulse back in April 2010 we only had two employees: me and my co-founder Akshay Kothari.

Linkedin lookup