My LinkedIn Data Analysis

Byadmin

Context

LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network, with over 850 million members in more than 200 countries and territories worldwide. LinkedIn allows members (both workers and employers) to create profiles and connect with each other in an online social network that may represent real-world professional relationships. Members can invite anyone (whether an existing member or not) to become a connection. LinkedIn can also be used to organize offline events, join groups, write articles, publish job postings, post photos and videos, and more.

Why the Analysis?

I have been hearing people post online about how recruiters contacted them because they show their work online. When I thought about it, I found out that a recruiter had only contacted me just once in almost five years of being on LinkedIn. 

Data Acquisition

To understand where something might be going wrong and how to fix it, I found that requesting my data from LinkedIn for any analysis of my choice, especially those not on LinkedIn’s default dashboard is possible, so I made the request and got the CSV.

Overall Question

Why am I not getting contacted by recruiters despite setting up a great LinkedIn Profile?

Dashboard Presentation

The dashboard was designed using PowerBI. The 3mins video below is a presentation that shows my thought process and how I arrived at the insights gained from my LinkedIn data.

Insights

  1. Most of my connections don’t have a company they work at. It could also be that they just chose not to add where they work and the job they do to their LinkedIn profile. This is very plausible because it is normal for people to add their position and company to LinkedIn if they are proud of it. Among these connections are also those who are self-employed This connotes that the people who find my LinkedIn profile are not those who could offer me the job I desire.
  2. My activities on Linkedin regarding adding connections were only significant in 2020. I believe this was because of Covid-19 that led to a lockdown, making people spend more time online. So in recent times, it is almost impossible for a recruiter to easily find me, except if they are doing a deep search on LinkedIn.
  3. None of my connections is a recruiter or hiring manager. This means that even if I share my work, except people share the content, it may be difficult for a recruiter/hiring manager to find me.

Recommended Actions

  1. I need to be more intentional about being active on LinkedIn and making new valuable connections.
  2. I need not expect people to connect with me randomly, but I should search for the kind of people that could help me achieve my goals of being on Linkedin, one of which is to get opportunities such as a lucrative job.
  3. I should connect with more recruiters and hiring managers so that they can easily find my profile or the contents I share about my work.

Lessons Learned 

Working on this project improved my knowledge of data cleaning and designing beautiful dashboards. It also taught me about looking into data the right way to get the right insight. Much more, this project taught me to look at data analytics as a problem-solving process where recommendations are expected after insights have been drawn.