Friday, February 19, 2010

LinkedIn Data analysis

The LinkedIn Blog posted today:
One hypothesis is that many of the employees left the financial industry.  According to the LinkedIn data set, that just isn’t true. There are a handful of people that did transition to other industries and start new careers, but most stayed in the financial space. To be specific, other than two acquiring companies (Bank of America acquired Merrill Lynch and Nomura acquired Lehman Brothers’ franchise in the Asia Pacific region), Barclays was by far the biggest beneficiary, scooping up 10% of the laid off talent, followed by Credit Suisse at 1.5% and Citigroup at 1.1 %.


I commented on the posting as follows:
Interesting analysis! Having left Fidelity then going back inside to spend some time on a contract, I know that there are LinkedIn profiles for folks still showing they are at Fidelity and that is not true. Is that an exception? or are there other profiles incorrectly reflecting a change in status? How much would that throw off this analysis?

Bottom-line, it is a data point. Be careful how you use the data.
The assumption is that folks have accurately reflected their status in their LinkedIn profile. Some number I have recognized have not. What is that percent? How can we arrived at a good number? Not sure, in the meantime, I would be careful with the numbers.