If you’re an ideal LinkedIn user, you regularly comb through your contacts’ updates and are never late with a “congratulations on your new job” card.
If you’re like me, you need to look up your password about once a year to add new connections and update your job description.
But now a new web app lets users like me tap into some of the benefits that more tuned-in LinkedIn users enjoy, and it could help level the networking playing field. “Job Change Notifier” simply sends an email notification when a contact changes his or her job.
The app, which launched late last week, is already being used by about 10,000 users who have signed up to track 1.5 million of their contacts.
Creator Roger Lee says that he created the app in a few weekends after noticing that the advertising startup he co-founded, PaperG, often benefited when a contact moved to a decision-making role.
The app looks like something made in one’s free time. You simply connect your LinkedIn profile, check off the contacts that you wish to track and start receiving email notifications when any of them change jobs. There’s no dashboard or newsfeed, but the app does the job for casual LinkedIn users. (Meanwhile, recruiters might be interested in a more intense, but unrelated, version of the concept called Bullhorn Reach.)
“I would be thrilled if [LinkedIn] made this a feature,” says Lee, who has no monetization aspirations for the app he created. “Based on the usage, I can tell that this is a feature people want.”
Perhaps LinkedIn has noticed, too. On Friday, the @LinkedInU Twitter account urged students to “check out the Job Change Notifier…see where your colleagues are going for their internships and full-time jobs!”
<i>Photo courtesy of Flickr, Nan Palmero
More About: Job Notifier App, Job searching, linkedin, networking
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