LinkedIn’s endorsement feature and “Hubs and Authorities”
LinkedIn has established itself as a professional social network. According to their quarterly report, over half of the company’s revenue came from the Hiring Service Business they offered to their primary paying customers. Therefore, providing their business customers quality candidate search service is a significant aspect of their business model. In September 2012, the company rolled out a feature named Endorsements to improve their candidate search quality. This new feature allowed its users to endorse their connections skills with one simple click. The intuition behind this feature resembles the basic idea of hubs and authorities, one of the link analysis methods introduced in chapter 14 of the book.
The Endorsements feature of LinedIn is based on the following algorithm: the recruiters will prefer someone whose skills are endorsed by someone they respect or acknowledge when deciding between two potential candidates who are at the same levels. The endorsements from connections serve as an filter in LinkedIn’s searching engine and affect candidates’ ranking in recruiters’ search. Hubs and Authorities is based on a similar search algorithm. A website that is linked by other important websites(authorities) is ranked on top of other websites because of the powerful endorsements it possesses.
However, the credibility of this feature is questionable. People tend to treat endorsements between each other or even endorse skills of their connections they are not sure about. These human factors may make this new feature meaningless and incredible. One way LinkedIn may react to these situations is to adjust the ranking based on prior searchers’ reactions to those endorsements as they explained on their “help” page: “Rankings are adjusted based on how prior searchers have reacted to your profile.” That way, it will be the quality, instead of the quantity, of the endorsements that count.
Source 1:http://www.marginhound.com/big-data-is-linkedin-building-a-pagerank-algorithm-for-job-hunters/
Source 2:http://www.networkcomputing.com/networking/what-linkedin-endorsements-mean-to-you/a/d-id/1106795?
Source 3:http://theundercoverrecruiter.com/linkedin-endorsements/