TUESDAY 25 AUG 2015 9:46 AM

LINKEDIN CREATES APP FOR EMPLOYEES

Professional social network, LinkedIn, has introduced an internal app that promises to connect employees.

The app, which has been titled LinkedIn Lookup, helps professionals find, learn about and contact their co-workers, a useful tool in large organisations.

LinkedIn conducted research which found that around 30% of its members search for people within their own organisation, revealing a desire and need for information about colleagues. This also highlights a shortcoming of intranets, which don’t usually hold that kind of information unless they are linked up to social channels.

The app allows members to search for their colleagues according to experience and key skills, which helps them find help for specific projects. They can then contact them by either in-app messaging or email.

Ankit Gupta, a senior project manager at LinkedIn and developer of the app, says, “When I co-founded Pulse back in April 2010 we only had two employees: me and my co-founder Akshay Kothari. We knew each other well, and of course we knew what the other was working on. 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. And I was concerned about the impact this could have on our culture and productivity.” The app is designed to combat the lack of one-on-one interaction in large organisations and the business implications of that. 

LinkedIn released another internal app back in April, Elevate allows companies and employees to share content with their social networks. LinkedIn also plans to create more products for companies’ internal needs in the hope that this will make it more of an everyday resource, rather than a service that is predominantly used by people who are searching for a new job role.

The LinkedIn Lookup app is currently free, is available on Apple iOS and will shortly be available on Android.

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