Lookup, a free app released by LinkedIn (LNKD) Wednesday, helps you find your coworkers and learn more about their background much more efficiently. A post on the company’s blog states that you can search for someone based on their name, title, experience, education, and skills.
Simply sign in with your company email address and you can search for and view any employee at your company that has a LinkedIn account, whether or not they have Lookup. It’s essentially a more easily searchable employee directory, listing all the basic information that is available on their LinkedIn profile plus their company email address and cellphone number if they choose to make those options available.
Prior to releasing the app, LinkedIn surveyed 814 North American professionals. It discovered that only 38% of them found their company’s intranet to be effective in helping them search for and learn about coworkers, and 58% of them said it would be more effective if they could search for someone based on specific skills.
This comes in handy for people working at large companies who are searching for someone with a specific skill set or background with which to collaborate.
Ankit Gupta, LinkedIn’s senior product manager, spoke to Business Insider about the company’s new app:
What we want to do is a very small but important thing — we want to help you find and learn about each other because we believe that will make you more productive.