A Weird New Metric

Someone recently told me that, when looking interviewing with a company, he looks at their LinkedIn ratio: the number of current employees registered with LinkedIn vs. all employees registered for that company, past and present. Even though that contains severe sample bias (since people switching companies are more likely to register with LinkedIn), he still thought it was useful. I'm unconvinced, but it's an interesting use of the service.

Comments

[Frank]

Michael, what does your friend see as the point of the ratio? Is he trying to figure out what the turnover is? If so, the ratio as described seems to me an incredibly crude way of going about it.

[Michael]

This actually came from someone I was interviewing. Yes, he was trying to use it as a turnover indicator -- which indeed gives very crude results. Because of the many biases, I don't think it's useful, but it was strange enough that I felt compelled to report on it.