Company pages on LinkedIn have serious integrity issues

Here's what LinkedIn has to say about its Company Pages feature in https://www.dhirubhai.net/help/linkedin/answer/28406 :

Through an organization's Company Page, you'll receive a high-level summary of the company along with basic information such as specialties, size, website URL, industry, and more.

Don't believe it.

While you might rely on the Company Size provided by a Company page administrator, you'll see that another measure of size, the number of employees associating themselves with the company, is completely unreliable. Witness this Help article at https://www.dhirubhai.net/help/linkedin/answer/1589 that states (with bold text mine) ...

The Employees on LinkedIn feature on a Company or University Page represents the total number of LinkedIn members who've affiliated their work experience with your company. It's not meant to be a source of truth or a way to validate company size. It's only a reflection of member-provided data.

That screen shot of the Help page was taken on March 14, 2017.

Company pages on LinkedIn have built-in integrity problems because the site accepts just about anything a member enters into the Company field while editing his or her profile. Company pages reflect the employees who claim to work for them, often mistakenly. So much unverified data has been allowed into the member's profiles that to correct the Company pages would be a major effort, one that LinkedIn will probably never undertake.

Borrowing from a great post I saw today headlined "Assume noble intent," we shouldn't make a blanket accusation of fraud whenever someone has picked the wrong company in saying where they work. LinkedIn makes it very easy 1) to be mistaken and 2) not to realize it when entering one's Company.

I'll show you how this issue presents itself with an actual company case study and explore some defense measures you can take ...

• as a company owner or page administrator,
• as a member editing your own profile,
• or as a member searching in company pages for others to connect with.

This data entry free-for-all is especially harmful to smaller businesses where impostors can outnumber real employees by orders of magnitude. The case study will show a company claiming only one employee where LinkedIn has allowed over 1,500 people into the employee list.

NOTE: LinkedIn uses the term "company" to include any entity for which one can work, from a solo freelancer to a giant conglomerate, across commercial industries and other fields such as non-profits, military branches, academic institutions, and government agencies.

An actual case study: Engineers and others at ACE

Picture yourself as a mechanical engineer working for a company you know as "ACE."

You edit your profile and bring up the Add experience panel. You type "Engineer" into the Title box and "ace" into Company. This gets you the drop-down list below:

BINGO! There at the third row, LinkedIn lists a company named simply, "ACE."

The industry is right (Mechanical or Industrial Engineering), so you select it. (Without seeing a logo or location, how are you to know it's not the right company?)

After you complete the entry with location, dates of employment and, optionally, a job description, you will have a new entry in your profile something like this:

When doing this research, I typed that [comment in brackets] for the Location and the screen accepted it, so obviously there's no sanity check on that field at all.

If you had added that piece of experience to your profile, you'd be able to link from it to the ACE company page. Its direct URL is https://www.dhirubhai.net/company-beta/375453/ (Your view of it may differ.)

We can presume that some information LinkedIn would not know was entered by the page administrator: the Company Size, its Industry, an About us blurb, and the Website. Headquarters is blank because the admin didn't enter it.

As for the website...

At first it was a mystery why the web link is dead but some research turned up the record of a defunct company.

The ZoomInfo profile reveals a company name of "ACE" with one to five employees and, buried in the description, the full name, "ACE Quality Improvement Corporation." It makes sense that it would have chosen "www.aceqi.ca" for its website, as the profile shows.

So we've identified an out-of-business, one-employee company with a dead website that continues to have a LinkedIn Company page. It's not all that surprising: a person can outlive his profile, so why not a company?

But why is LinkedIn reporting that 2,040 employees work there? As a further mystery, why, upon clicking the link to "See all 2,040 employees" is the list headed "Showing 1,577 results?"

Since LinkedIn has put no filter, no throttle, and no confirmation or challenge on the Company field, many people working for "Ace" or "ACE" companies worldwide will pick the first choice that LinkedIn presents to them as they fill out their profiles. For them, the choice turns into a trap.

Since LinkedIn does give a piece of context, "Mechanical or Industrial Engineering," I'll concede that those who work in other fields may bear part of the blame.

Let's see what countries some of the "employees" reside in and what their job titles are. Here's the first page of the listing:

Analysis

I tabulated 80 employees from the first four pages of that list. They reside in 52 worldwide locations, the countries ranging from Argentina to Uruguay. But not Canada.

Here are some of their job titles:

Where's Waldo (the person in Toronto)? Probably way down in the 1,577! I wasn't able to port that much data into the spreadsheet, but what I did get proves the point -- that the data is commingled and essentially worthless if you want to know who really works for this particular ACE company.

Forty-eight of the 80 employees worked for the exact company name of "Ace," while others worked for everything from ACE - Inglês e Intercambio Cultural Ltda. to the University of Tabriz. (It was possible some months ago to show two company names for a single piece of experience, one of them the LinkedIn-indexed name and the other a display name.)

If only LinkedIn would ask a person editing a profile--

• This company is in Ontario, Canada: are you sure you work there?
• You are the 2nd (20th ... 500th ... 1500th) employee of this one-person company: are you sure you work there?

People are choosing simply "ACE" as the employer company even when it is really...

• ACE Micromatic Group
• Arab Consulting Engineers
• Ace International
• ACE Alsafar & Partners
• ACE Real Estate Brokers
• Ace Hardware
• Atlas Copco Energas K?ln
• Air Connect Engineering
• Associated Consulting Engineers
• Ambala College of Engineering
• and others.

As I'm sure you can imagine, "Ace" is not the only company name affected by data integrity problems. LinkedIn members, never having been told how to choose their companies carefully, will pick ones that only seem right. They become accidental impostors, cluttering up random company pages with totally useless information as to who works where.

How does LinkedIn's lack of company data integrity harm users?

• Employees all over the world are made to appear as if they work for the wrong firms and are inattentive to detail or unprofessional.
• Members' profiles are stripped of the value of association with their true employers and co-workers.
• Individuals searching LinkedIn to identify people they know (or may want to know) at "target" companies are flooded with false hits, no level of Premium membership able to overcome the garbage-in-garbage-out syndrome.
• Administrators of company pages are often blind to the bogus employee problem and handicapped in taking control because removal of bogus employees can only be done by request to LinkedIn.
• Companies have pages that look poorly managed with weak attention to detail, rigor, and professionalism, harming their reputations.

You can easily see that these problems apply not just to employees of Ace, the quality improvement corporation and all its like-named relatives, but to possibly tens or hundreds of thousands of individuals who work for all manner of organizations whose names are confused with each other.

Takeaways: Some self-defense tactics

If you are creating a company page, say for your consultancy business, be sure and have a very distinctive logo on your company page and choose a name as dissimilar as possible to any other company on LinkedIn. "ACE," only three letters long and used by so many around the world, was not an especially modern, web-suitable, search-engine-optimized company name. You no longer need to be at the top of an alphabetized list as in the old classified phone book; you need to be distinct but memorable.

As the administrator of your company page, scan your employee list from time to time and know the process for reporting people who mistakenly associate themselves with you. Use this link ==> Notice of Inaccurate Profile Information .

If you are entering some experience onto your profile, be very careful what you allow to fill the Company field. Do not select just any name that looks like a good fit -- keep typing until you spell the full legal name of the entity or you see a logo that you know is right. Understand that through acquisitions and mergers, there will be well-known company names and logos that go missing due to removal of their company pages. Prefer a "ghost-company" logo that links to nothing over a wrong logo and company.

When you have entered a new piece of experience, revisit your profile and try clicking on the logo--does it take you to a company page? Is it the right company? If the logo is not a hyperlink and you know that there is no company page, that is perfectly fine.

If you see that your company has a page with no logo, a non-distinctive name, or bogus employees, alert the page administrator -- or take action if you are that person -- to make the necessary adjustments.

If you are looking through company pages for people you might know (to connect to someone at a target company), be very careful. There is no guarantee that those listed actually work at the company. The chances are better at big name companies, but still, no process exists to weed out the accidental impostors other than a company page administrator doing due diligence. If you see a 10-person company with 1000 employees, I would recommend that you just don't touch that link, "See all 1000 employees," as it will waste your search credits (unless you have premium, unlimited searching) and will waste your time in any event.

If you feel that your subscription fees are wasted in view of the admitted data integrity shortcomings of the LinkedIn Company Pages feature, I suggest you let someone know who can help you do something about it. Anyone know any good class-action lawyers?

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I enjoy writing about technical aspects of LinkedIn. With the recently widening rollout of the so-called new user experience on the browser, many of the articles I've published on the site have been overtaken by events, but I hope the concepts in them that are still up-to-date will be of help to you.

Thanks for reading. Please 'like,' comment on, or share this article if you found it helpful.

By the way, don't repeat this experiment yourself unless you have unlimited searching on a premium account -- a few passes through this and some similar searches exhausted my monthly "commercial use" quota before day 8!