I’ve had a LinkedIn account since they launched about a decade ago, and I am definitely a power user. LinkedIn has grown and changed, just as has my own requirements and motivations for using it have changed. Over the past few years in particular, I have had hundreds of conversations with friends and colleagues in the research and analytics space who were looking for their next great career opportunity. I have always recommended spending time on LinkedIn as an excellent investment when it comes to career management. Here are just three of many career management (and job search) questions you can answer with a little bit of work on LinkedIn.
- Which local companies have the largest departments in your field?
- What skill sets do you need acquire to get the next level?
- How do I find rock stars for your team?
Let’s start with the first one, which is finding local companies with larger departments in your field, because they will invariably be the ones with the most career opportunities.
Before proceeding further, I’d like to cover one key point. We have all heard the adage, that when it comes to data collection, organization and analysis, “garbage it, garbage out,” and you will always be limited by the quality and structure of your data. LinkedIn is an enormous self-reported database that collects data via an always improving user interface, but they have always allowed users a great deal of leeway when it comes to entering data. A great example of this is university degree, where profiles include BS, B.S., Bachelors, Bachelor’s, Bachelor of Science, etc. Yes, tools for gathering and analyzing unstructured data have never been better, and I’m sure LinkedIn does a lot of this on the back end, but from the perspective of someone doing searches via their user interface, we will be limited by the quality and consistency of the data entry that takes place when users build out their profiles (that is until LinkedIn figures out a way to incorporate this into their search offerings). I’ve seen two people with the same exact job use different words, phrases, acronyms, titles, etc. As a user searching the LinkedIn database, you just have to learn to work with it. Other obvious issues are that not everyone is on LinkedIn (believe it or not), and there are also lots of profiles with little or incomplete data, making them difficult to find and include in your searches. Just be aware that no queries will represent the entire population (those with or without LinkedIn accounts), or the entire LinkedIn segment you are attempting to aggregate via your search, but that search results are highly suggestive and often give cause for further digging.
Back to our experiment. Let’s say you were trying to find which companies in your area employed the largest number of your colleagues. For this example, we will make finding traditional marketing research employees our goal.
Login to your LinkeIn account and click “advanced” hypertext next to the search icon at the top of the page. Copy and paste/enter the following in the advanced search boxes on the left navigation bar:
- Current Title: “insight” OR “insights” OR “market research” OR “marketing research” OR “research analyst” OR “research manager” OR “research director” OR “marketing analyst” OR “category analyst” OR “customer research” OR “consumer research” OR “research & measurement” OR “performance measurement”
- Postal Code: 90514
- Search Within: 35 mi (55 km)
- Relationships: All
- Locations: All
PS: I have found this to be a decent title search for this particular group. “Project Manager” is a popular and obvious exclusion, but there are so many profiles with a Project Manager title which are not market research related that if included, would render our results meaningless. This is an example of working around things. There are other ways to find market research related Project Managers,” just let me know if you need a suggestion. Also, when copying data into search fields, be sure to use straight up and down quotes (“).
The ordering of your profiles found will differ depending upon who you know, but you should also get around 2,827 results.
Now, scroll down on the lower left hand navigation bar, and click on and expand the “Current Company” tab. LinkedIn displayed as many as 10+ companies a few months ago, but now they only offer 5 only at a time. Nonetheless, you should see the beginnings of your list:
- Lieberman Research Worldwide (113)
- Mattel (35)
- UCLA (32)
- University of Southern California (25)
- Amgen (24)
Here is the time consuming but awesome little list building trick. In the “Company” box, select “Current” in the drop down box below the data entry field and start eliminating companies 5 at a time (as below) in order to show the next 5. Enter the following:
Current Company: NOT (“lieberman research” OR mattel OR ucla OR university OR amgen)
The Top 10 Los Angeles companies within a 35 mile radius that have the largest market research teams are:
- Lieberman Research Worldwide (113)
- Mattel (35)
- UCLA (32)
- University of Southern California (25)
- Amgen (24)
- The Walt Disney Company (20)
- Ipsos (18)
- Nestle S.A. (17)
- DIRECTV (17)
- Disney ABC Television (16)
Take it to the Top 15 by entering:
Current Company: NOT (“lieberman research” OR mattel OR ucla OR university OR amgen OR “walt disney company” OR ipsos OR nestle OR directv OR “abc television”)
- Lieberman Research Worldwide (113)
- Mattel (35)
- UCLA (32)
- University of Southern California (25)
- Amgen (24)
- The Walt Disney Company (20)
- Ipsos (18)
- Nestle S.A. (17)
- DIRECTV (17)
- Disney ABC Television (16)
- NBCUniversal, Inc. (16)
- Yahoo (15)
- Warner Bros. Entertainment Group of Companies (15)
- IBISWorld (15)
- Southern California Edison (SCE) (15)
Take it to the Top 20 by entering:
Current Company: NOT (“lieberman research” OR mattel OR ucla OR university OR amgen OR “walt disney company” OR ipsos OR nestle OR directv OR “abc television” OR nbcuniversal OR yahoo OR “warner bros” OR ibisworld OR edison)
- Lieberman Research Worldwide (113)
- Mattel (35)
- UCLA (32)
- University of Southern California (25)
- Amgen (24)
- The Walt Disney Company (20)
- Ipsos (18)
- Nestle S.A. (17)
- DIRECTV (17)
- Disney ABC Television (16)
- NBCUniversal, Inc. (16)
- Yahoo (15)
- Warner Bros. Entertainment Group of Companies (15)
- IBISWorld (15)
- Southern California Edison (SCE) (15)
- J.D. Power (15)
- Sony Pictures Entertainment (14)
- Bank of America (13)
- Red Bull (13)
- Disney Interactive (12)
Take it to the Top 25 by entering:
Current Company: NOT (“lieberman research” OR mattel OR ucla OR university OR amgen OR “walt disney company” OR ipsos OR nestle OR directv OR “abc television” OR nbcuniversal OR yahoo OR “warner bros” OR ibisworld OR edison OR power OR “sony pictures” OR america OR “red bull” OR “disney interactive”)
- Lieberman Research Worldwide (113)
- Mattel (35)
- UCLA (32)
- University of Southern California (25)
- Amgen (24)
- The Walt Disney Company (20)
- Ipsos (18)
- Nestle S.A. (17)
- DIRECTV (17)
- Disney ABC Television (16)
- NBCUniversal, Inc. (16)
- Yahoo (15)
- Warner Bros. Entertainment Group of Companies (15)
- IBISWorld (15)
- Southern California Edison (SCE) (15)
- J.D. Power (15)
- Sony Pictures Entertainment (14)
- Bank of America (13)
- Red Bull (13)
- Disney Interactive (12)
- American Honda Motor Company, Inc. (11)
- First 5 LA (11)
- Farmers Insurance (10)
- Variety (10)
- Nielsen (9)
You should be looking at something close to this (since folks change their current titles & company regularly, it may be off by a few)
This makes a tidy list of companies to keep an eye on and as well as a list of colleagues to connect with, For specific user profiles of people at each company, you can either click on their company name in “Current Company” in the lower left navigation bar, or you could leave the “Current Title” field as is, enter the company’s name you are looking for in the “Company” field, select “Current” in the drop down below it and hit “Search.”
Several important things you may have noticed.
- It’s best to enter text queries in lower case and operators (AND, OR, NOT, etc) must be entered in CAPS.
- As with any database query, one mistake messes up the whole search. For example, each opening parentheses and search string quotation mark needs to be closed.
- Shorten up company names when you can and where it make sense, i.e., Disney ABC Television to “abc television” or Edison as opposed to Southern California Edison, assuming that there are likely no other companies with Edison in their name.
- Search strings can get pretty long, but fear not, I have never hit the upper limit for search string length (see below).
So, what companies do the other 2,176 people work at? Great question.
As mentioned above, since we are not working with “clean” data, things get tricky. A company may get acquired for example, but some might not update their new company name. Others might have misspell it. You will see in the search below that several spellings and subsidiary names needed to be included in the list, but were essentially the same company as prior companies listed in the search string. There are all kinds of issues which become apparent as you start doing more complex searches and analyzing the results closely. This is true of any data set obviously.
Added Bonus:
Here are the approximate Top 100 companies in Los Angles employing our target titles within the target radius. It would take too much time to format them in a list as above, but you get the point. Plug the below into the “company” field and you’ll see that there are still another ~1,551 profiles, but at that point, each of the companies listed have a team of 3 or less.
NOT (“lieberman research” OR mattel OR ucla OR university OR amgen OR “walt disney company” OR ipsos OR nestle OR directv OR “abc television” OR nbcuniversal OR yahoo OR “warner bros” OR ibisworld OR edison OR power OR “sony pictures” OR america OR “red bull” OR “disney interactive” OR “first 5” OR “farmers insurance” OR honda OR variety OR nielsen OR univision OR otx OR activision OR “paramount pictures” OR “california institute” OR “added value” OR “poll-market” OR medtronic OR “propulsion” OR iri OR lasalle OR “health net” OR “cedars-sinai” OR milken OR scherzer OR interpret OR “western asset” OR bovitz OR nbcuniversal OR “nbc universal” OR “fox filmed” OR “fox broadcasting” OR shopzilla OR “cbs television” OR “lamps plus” OR “los angeles” OR “rand corporation” OR “murphy research” OR neutrogena OR kaiser OR “time warner” OR “universal music” OR maritz OR cushman OR millichap OR edmunds OR crutcher OR “guitar center” OR “demand media” OR eharmony OR kayne OR ecivis OR toyota OR “screen engine” OR america OR northrop OR mondelez OR unitedhealth OR kraft OR countrywide OR “century fox” OR “state farm” OR “warner home” OR verizon OR endeavor OR dennison OR “capital group” OR acosta OR pharmavite OR beachbody OR stats OR adept OR “california association” OR brandiq OR unitedhealthcare OR “united healthcare” OR “optum health” OR seiu OR travis OR kotra OR jpmorgan OR “universal pictures” OR “roll global” OR viacon OR “fox interactive” OR anthem OR saatchi OR viacom OR nuveen OR siegel OR fiji OR lrw or caltech OR “east west” OR hall OR guggenheim OR gsn OR sterling OR “search agency OR panda OR conill)
The post LinkedIn Part 1: Which Local Companies Hire The Greatest Number Of Your Collegues appeared first on Market Research Recruiter.
