Adding contacts to LinkedIn and changing jobs

January 12, 2011 5:39 AM

Has there ever been any research done on whether there is any correlation between spurts of adding contacts to LinkedIn or LinkedIn activity and someone changing job?

I've noticed among people I know that there seems to be an increase in LinkedIn activity and them changing jobs. I was idly wondering if anybody had ever done research that showed any statistical relationship between the two.

posted by MuffinMan to Work & Money (2 answers total)

Linkedin doesn't seem to share much user data in any form, so I highly doubt there is any trustworthy 'research' out there.

But I share your qualitative sense of activity correlated with job loss/change. I would add that my linkedin activity shoots up during/after conference and networking events as well.
posted by markovitch at 5:48 AM on January 12, 2011

Best answer: Actually, LinkedIn shares a lot of data and has a whole team of scientists that regularly publish findings. You could conceivably contact them to ask this question, or if you know a developer, they might be able to use the developer tools to research this.

I asked LinkedIn on Twitter a few months ago if they would do an "amnesty day" of sorts, where people could change/update their profiles without signaling that they were changing jobs, and their official Twitter account replied with a general message that people could always update their profiles. So it may be that they don't want to concede a link between updates and job changes, though obviously it's likely one exists.
posted by anildash at 6:45 AM on January 12, 2011