Thursday, May 22, 2014

LinkedIn’s Hunger Games: Will You Volunteer As Tribute?



Get ready to feel really awkward on LinkedIn. The professional social network introduced a new feature Wednesday that turns logging on to LinkedIn into a game-like experience by showing you how you stack up against other people in your network.

If you’re familiar with the universe of The Hunger Games, LinkedIn, once a safe place to share news articles and network, has turned into some kind of digital Panem, and we are all now volunteering as tribute.

Called How You Rank, the feature is a new part of Who’s Viewed Your Profile, the statistics dashboard on your account that shows you which people are looking at your LinkedIn page. How You Rank lets users see how popular their profiles are in relationship to other people in their network.
LinkedIn’s new popularity contest will no doubt encourage people to scramble around to get more views on their profile, which will no doubt increase the social network's page views—a metric closely watched by analysts on Wall Street, where the company faces its own kind of ruthless ranking against other Internet companies.

The How You Rank page shows you what percentile you rank for profile views among your connections, which connections have been viewed the most, and how much those numbers have increased in the last two weeks. The right hand side of the How You Rank dashboard features personalized suggestions on how to get more people to look at your profile, like updating your summary, joining targeted groups, or adding a specific skill.

By following LinkedIn’s tips, you’ll spend more time perfecting your profile and competing with professionals you might not know personally—as if there wasn’t enough competition in the workplace already.

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