Company Profiles for all: We’re working our way through your wish list

It is now about a month since we launched the beta version of our Company Profiles to Premium Members, and this feature will soon be available to basic XING members as well. We’ll be launching in three phases, to make sure we have enough capacities to reply promptly to user questions  – giving an additional 2 million members access to “Companies” every week, which they’ll find in their newly redesigned XING header.

Tens of thousands of members have been using the feature over the past few weeks and sending us valuable feedback on their initial responses and user experience. A massive thank you for this from the whole XING team! There’s good news to report too: The first features and changes to be made as a direct result of our feedback tool UserVoice are going live today. Here’s just a brief glimpse at some user-initiated changes.

• Employees who weren’t listed or were incorrectly classified on the Company Profiles can now confirm that they belong to a certain company with the help of a new button. One reason for this may be that you spelled the name of the company differently to others – but now one click is all it takes to solve the problem. The company name listed in the Company Profile will then replace the name of the employer currently displayed in your own profile. All you need to do is confirm this by clicking save, and you’ll be added to the list of company employees!
• We’ve also improved the algorithm used for generating Company Profiles. It now takes special characters into consideration when creating profiles, for instance. Several similar Company Profiles will also be consolidated into one if names only differ in terms of additional information added in brackets.
• Up until now, only the latest company entry in members’ profiles was taken into consideration when establishing the “Employee since” statistics for a Company Profile. Thanks to your feedback, we have now taken into account the fact that some users make new entries in their profile whenever they change position within the same company. All these entries will be included in the statistics from now on, provided the company name is spelled consistently in each case.
• The number of members per company profile is now also displayed in the list of search results.

So as you can see: Additional improvements are being worked on all the time, and there’s a lot more still to come too.

Make sure you take a look at our feedback tool for Company Profiles to keep up to speed on which new ideas, top ideas and hot ideas we’re currently reviewing and working on. And let us know what YOU think!