Just provide a link to a public LinkedIn profile and an email address and that’s it. The system will go find other folks on LinkedIn who best match that given profile and email back a summary of the results.
It leverages some very useful IR techniques along with a basic machine learned model to optimize the matching quality.
Some use cases:
- If I provide a link to a star engineer, I can find a bunch of folks like that person to go try to recruit. One could also use LinkedIn / Google search to find people, but sometimes it can be difficult to formulate the right query and may be easier to just pivot off an ideal candidate.
- I recently shared it with a colleague of mine who just graduated from college. He really wants to join a startup but doesn’t know of any (he just knows about the big companies like Microsoft, Google, Yahoo!, etc.). With this tool he found people who shared similar backgrounds and saw which small companies they work at.
- Generally browsing the people graph based on credentials as opposed to relationships. It seems to be a fun way to find like minded people around the world and see where they ended up. I’ve recently been using it to find advisors and customers based on folks I admire.
Anyways, just a fun application I developed on the side. It’s not perfect by any means but I figured it’s worth sharing.
It’s pretty compute intensive, so if you want to try it send mail to [contact at pplmatch dot com] to get your email address added to the list. Also, do make sure that the profiles you supply expose lots of text publicly – the more text the better the results.
Vik's Blog 