Several years ago I heard the company I worked for say they had a way to get notified if it seemed like an employee might be thinking of leaving, so they could take some kind of action. I now wonder if LinkedIn, or various job sites, were selling them data.

LinkedIn might not need to sell the data. You can set your profile to “open for work” privately, and only recruiters can see it. So if your company has people with LinkedIn recruiter accounts, they could see your profile set to looking for work

PS: I guess given that recruiter accounts are paid, LinkedIn is technically selling access to the data in a way

It is pretty easy to signal stuff on linkedin without intending to do so. For example whenever I get an old coworker adding me on linkedin, they are 100% of the time job seeking. Inevitably they start a new role some weeks later.

All one has to do is just measure employees linkedin activity. I mean truthfully people don’t use the site at all if they aren’t actively looking for work. It is corporate dystopia otherwise. It is trivial to find these signals.

LinkedIn is a job board so that seems unlikely.

Are you kidding? They've probably been selling a datastream of who in the company has been job searching to company HR departments the whole time. Search for a job on LinkedIn and I bet anybody with a paid corporate account can find that out if they care to.

If they have been doing that, they haven't offered it to me, which seems weird since I'm their ICP.

The simpler explanation is that they aren't doing that.

why is everyone online so incorrectly conspiratorial-minded nowadays? and no, there are not just way more conspiracies nowadays

Why give corps like Microsoft the benefit of the doubt, when you'll be right more often than not by accusing them of anything underhanded?

LinkedIn actually sued HiQ Labs, which scraped LinkedIn to do exactly this (and this extensions scanning is likely a defense mechanism against similar attacks):

https://epic.org/documents/linkedin-corp-v-hiq-labs-inc/

> HiQ has created two specific data products targeted at employers: (1) “Keeper,” which informs employers which of their employees are at “risk” of being recruited by competitors; and...

My hunch is that HiQ simply looked for spikes in activity on LinkedIn as a signal for a job hunt: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47566893

In any case, this lawsuit was discussed a few times on HN at the time, and IIRC there were a fair bit of support for allowing free scraping of "public information." Interesting how the sentiment here has turned these days...

LinkedIn is a job board as much as Facebook is picture-sharing website

Not in Lithuania. While it's not the No1 or 2,3 platform for job advertisements, it's still very popular, especially for IT and management jobs.

So this probably depends on the country.

Sorry, I meant more like vast majority of people daily on LinkedIn are not there cause they are unemployed and looking for work