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The LinkedIn Skills Recommender is one of the most impressive features LinkedIn has released in a long time, both from a UI perspective and a data science persp

by tarr11 14y ago

The LinkedIn Skills Recommender is one of the most impressive features LinkedIn has released in a long time, both from a UI perspective and a data science perspective. Here's what they are trying to do (long term) http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57554673-93/linkedin-ceo-site-will-become-economic-graph-over-next-decade/ http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57554673-93/linkedin-ceo-si... Calling this "broken" shows a misunderstanding of what LinkedIn is trying to accomplish. LinkedIn has a huge amount of data on you and your professional relationships, starting from how you know the other person to how many times they have viewed your profile. They are trying to increase the depth and value of your LinkedIn profile by strengthening the graph of data connections, and encouraging users to enter more skills data into your own profile. They are also trying to increase engagement amongst their user base. The author suggests that if Linked either: a) Limit skills recommendations to people with similar skills. If you did this, you will collect an order of magnitude less recommendation data. How many people in your LinkedIn list actually know the same skills as you? I have a lot of connections in adjacent industries. Every time I see that someone has recommended me, I have two incentives. First is to ensure that my skills profile on LinkedIn is complete (so that I may get the appropriate recommendations). Second is to recommend others effectively. If someone perceives you to be good at a particular skill, even though they don't know that skill themselves, isn't that valuable? LinkedIn is about managing your reputation - not just among people with the same skills, but amongst your entire professional network. For example, if you knew someone was good at MongoDB, even though you didn't know anything about MongoDB, couldn't that be something that is important on your resume? Don't you think it could help you get a job? b) Create a new feature to rank the "strength" of the recommendation. FYI - Here's LinkedIn's skills page for "C#": http://www.linkedin.com/skills/skill/C%23?trk=skills-pg-search http://www.linkedin.com/skills/skill/C%23?trk=skills-pg-sear... - They've got some clustering algorithms to find similar skills - They know who are the most "influential" people with that skill (wow) So, this is a good idea, but I think that LinkedIn is already doing it. I would not be surprised if they are using it, but perhaps not in the way you think. It could be used on their recruiting tool to find the best "C#" developers out there. It often doesn't make sense to publish these kinds of "reputation" scores publicly; that will just encourage you to game it. For example, if you knew that the strength of your recommendations impacted how often you showed up in candidate search results, you might start encouraging your friends to create bogus recommendations, just to move up the rankings.

eykanal 14y ago
1) I completely agree that it's an extremely impressive feature. 2) Tremendous amounts of bad data is far less desirable than "only a lot" of good data. The data as they're collecting it now is simply untrustworthy;. It essentially is a measure of "are these people connected at all?", which is completely redundant to other information they already have. 3) The page you link to is pretty cool. It seems like they are doing that. Why is it hidden on a "skills" page, which probably receives orders of magnitude less visibility than the individual pages? More broadly, though, you suggest that the goal is to create user profile depth: > They are trying to increase the depth and value of your LinkedIn profile by strengthening the graph of data connections, and encouraging users to enter more skills data into your own profile. They are also trying to increase engagement amongst their user base. I would counter that this is only a partially correct view. LinkedIn is trying to increase the value of their site, both to the individual looking to connect and the company looking to hire. What I suggest would make this feature significantly more useful for companies looking to hire. LinkedIn should always be pursuing a number of goals in parallel, and saying that "this feature doesn't need to satisfy X because it's intended for Y" gives them way more slack than they should have.

by tarr11 14y ago

eykanal 14y ago

1) I completely agree that it's an extremely impressive feature. 2) Tremendous amounts of bad data is far less desirable than "only a lot" of good data. The data as they're collecting it now is simply untrustworthy;. It essentially is a measure of "are these people connected at all?", which is completely redundant to other information they already have. 3) The page you link to is pretty cool. It seems like they are doing that. Why is it hidden on a "skills" page, which probably receives orders of magnitude less visibility than the individual pages? More broadly, though, you suggest that the goal is to create user profile depth: > They are trying to increase the depth and value of your LinkedIn profile by strengthening the graph of data connections, and encouraging users to enter more skills data into your own profile. They are also trying to increase engagement amongst their user base. I would counter that this is only a partially correct view. LinkedIn is trying to increase the value of their site, both to the individual looking to connect and the company looking to hire. What I suggest would make this feature significantly more useful for companies looking to hire. LinkedIn should always be pursuing a number of goals in parallel, and saying that "this feature doesn't need to satisfy X because it's intended for Y" gives them way more slack than they should have.