Amazing insight:
If your employees are updating their Linkedin profiles, it’s one of the better indicators that they’ve started looking for other work.
Now, your employees might be savvy enough to change this setting in their profile first:
If this is the case, you won’t just see their passive-aggressive profile updating in your news feed whilst you’re checking out other roles. You could take some time to stalk their profiles daily in incognito mode, but this could be time consuming. You might be in charge of a lot of employees! You could automate this.
Linkedin obviously aren’t too fond of being crawled or scraped. Check out their robots.txt, or their scraping policy. If you were going to go ahead with this, here’s how it might work:
- Cron job to download each profile page at regular intervals – weekly or daily making the most sense.
- Perform a difference test between versions of the same profile page.
- If there is a difference, send an email or text containing the old and new versions of the profile. If there’s no difference you can delete the previous version. If you want to get fancy you can do this with a screenshot or by generating a pdf to send to yourself, their manager, and HR. These can highlight the new or updated information.
- Ham-fistedly ask your employee “Hey, how’s it going?”
- Live with yourself.
Don’t do this, it’s massively creepy. This post came out of my learning Ruby, so it might be one of the ideas I may have built one evening. There is an API, but they may frown at this use case.
If you’re headhunting this is essentially a way to spot blood in the water before the other sharks do.