Mapping the Unleash World Exhibitors Network Using LinkedIn Data

Tomorrow the Unleash World conference starts in Paris and we are incredibly excited! This will be the first time that Polinode has attended the Unleash World conference and both Andrew Pitts and Chad Taberner are very much looking forward to it after hearing amazing things.

Back in April of this year, we attended the Unleash America conference in Las Vegas. It was at that conference that we first had the idea of using the “People Also Viewed” data in LinkedIn to map the ecosystem of HR Tech companies based on a seed list. In this blog post after the event that is exactly what we did - used the list of sponsors for the Unleash America conference to map the HR Tech ecosystem.

Now, on the eve of the Unleash World conference, we thought it was only appropriate to extend the same analysis to the Unleash World conference. That is to say, to take the list of the ~175 exhibitors at the Unleash World conference and use them as a seed list to then create a network of relationships between these sponsors (and other companies) using the People Also Viewed data from Linkedin as pictured below for Polinode.  

We collected the list of companies that were in the list of “People Also Viewed” profiles for each of these 175 sponsors and we then iterated this process - collecting the list of “People Also Viewed” profiles for those companies and so on. The stopping condition was reached once we collected 500 profiles in total and there were some thresholds applied before a new company was added to the network.

In the first network view below, we have sized the nodes in the network (i.e. companies) by the total number of incoming connections that they received from other companies (i.e. the total number of other company profiles that we collected where that company was mentioned as a “People Also Viewed” profile). We have added some labels to those companies that (a) are exhibitors and (b) had 7 or more incoming connections from other companies. You will notice some familiar names from the Unleash America analysis, such as Deloitte, but it’s interesting to also see some new names, in particular the French company, Le Lab RH (or HR Lab in English), that we understand is connected to many of the French startups that will be attending Unleash World.

The second view that we have created is the result of applying the Louvain detection algorithm. This is an algorithm that partitions the network into groups of more closely connected nodes. You will see that there are ten distinct communities that have been detected by the algorithm. We will leave it to the reader to explore each of these communities in detail but we do notice here distinct groupings of Applicant Tracking Companies, Consulting companies, Health and Wellbeing companies, just to mention a few.

Without a doubt though, the community that we are most interested in at Polinode, is the group of People Analytics companies (the category that we, as an Organizational Network Analysis company, fall in). This is Community 4 in the above network, i.e. the light green community that you will see towards the top and center of the network. We have captured an image of this community with labels below and you will notice that many of the largest and best-known People Analytics communities are present, such as One Model, Visier and Crunchr.        

We are very much looking forward to further exploring this HR Tech ecosystem in the exhibit hall over the next couple of days! If you are at Unleash World, please don’t hesitate to come and say hello to us at booth C111….we also have a network that we have seeded with all of the more than 200 speakers at Unleash World that will be available to view and explore at our booth.