I’m noticing: there’s a high statistical correlation between people getting more than one recommendation on their LinkedIn profile and switching jobs. In fact I haven’t found a single case in my network where 2+ recommendations have not been coincident with an effort to find a new job.

A new tool for managers, perhaps? Monitor LinkedIn to see which of your employees are about to flee.

In case you didn’t believe my earlier ramblings, here’s the short version:

A small group of schools account for a disproportionate amount of billionaire education. Just 20 universities and colleges account for 52% of the billionaire graduates while 182 schools count for the remainder.

Via Yahoo Finance.

Don Dodge discussed the very small percentage of content creators versus viewers:

in a group of 100 people online, one will create content, 10 will “interact” with it (commenting or adding to it) and the other 89 will just view it.

True enough. However, it’s important not to discount the value of “just viewing”. Viewing is an expression of attention, and attention is an immensely valuable metric to track. View and click data, for example, play a significant part in how Google/Yahoo/etc rank their search results - the more users click on a given item in the search results, the more prominent rank it gets in the results.

Consider a list of 100 random headlines pulled from random news sources. Consider 100k users viewing those headlines and clicking on the ones that interest them. Immediately you have a system for finding the most interesting stories of the day, simply by tallying which headlines get the most views.

A big part of the power of the web is the latent data that can be gleamed from the day-to-day, non-explicit actions of the masses. Content creators create obvious value, but lurkers and viewers play a vital role in unlocking, exposing, and magnifying the value of that content.

I gave a talk at UCSD a couple of days ago. After the talk several students came up to me asking about how to find internships and full time positions at Yahoo. As it so happened we had our HR folks right there and they got connected up.

I told every one of the students that I spoke with that they should drop me an email; that the best way to find a job you like is to connect with people in industry.

Two days later and not a single email. I remember being the same way as an undegrad, somehow intimidated to connect with others. I remember how surprised I was when I got several offers for an internship I had applied for.

Here’s a clue: if you want a job, ask for it. Make an effort. Write the damned email. The fact is we are hiring as fast as we can get good candidates. The positions are open and available. All you have to do is connect with somebody. And here’s a shocker: dropping your resume into a pile of other resumes is not the best way to get noticed. Talk to somebody.

There’s a strange disconnect here: I’d love to get access to excellent students; there are many positions at Yahoo and I have visibility into lots of other opportunities as well. Students want to find good jobs and internships, and there are plenty of good ones that haven’t found it. But we’re not connecting nearly as well as we could be. Odd.