This is an exciting week in the HR world with the HR Technology Conference taking place in Vegas. Chad Taberner and I (Andrew Pitts) will be there all week and are looking forward to seeing both new and familiar faces at the Polinode booth (#1433).

Inspired by the work we did a couple of months ago, where we used the People Also Viewed data from LinkedIn to map the global People Analytics network, we decided to create a network based on the 2023 Top 100 HR Tech Influencers. This list is published each year by the editorial team at Human Resource Executive and the organizers of the HR Technology Conference.

The first step in the process was to extract the 100 LinkedIn profiles of the 2023 Top 100 HR Tech Influencers. We then retrieved the list of “People Also Viewed” profiles for each of these individuals from LinkedIn. You can see an example of these People Also Viewed profiles for my own profile below.

We then iterated this process - repeatedly retrieving the People Also Viewed data for well connected individuals with a stopping criterion of retrieving 500 profiles in total. The result is an interactive network in Polinode, where the Top 100 HR Tech Influencers have been utilized as seed profiles. We have included a saved view from this network below. The nodes are sized by the total number of incoming connections they have, where node A has a connection to node B if node B is included in the list of People Also Viewed profiles of node A.

You may click on the image above to view a larger version of it. We have made this network publicly available in Polinode so you may also click the following link to view a live version of this network in Polinode which you can explore and interact with: https://app.polinode.com/networks/explore/651d0353801c90001173f974/651e605e801c9000117443c1

The blue nodes in the network above are the initial seed profiles, i.e. the 2023 Top 100 HR Tech Influencers and the pink nodes are additional connected nodes in the network. Note that we have filtered out less connected profiles here and focused on the major component of the network. We have added labels in this view for the existing Top 100 HR Tech Influencers in the network that have more than 15 incoming connections, i.e.:

1. David Green;

2. Richard Rosenow;

3. Josh Bersin;

4. Al Adamsen;

5. Jason Averbook; and

6. Sarah White.

The question we are most focussed on here is: based on the structure of this network, who are some highly connected HR Tech Influencers that are not currently in the recently published list of the Top 100 HR Tech Influencers? When we work with client organizations on Active and Passive Organizational Network Analyses, we often compare the list of individuals that have different types of informal influence in the organization to those individuals that are currently identified by more formal High Potential / High Performance talent programs. We frequently find that more diverse talent tends to be under-represented in the more formal talent identification programs relative to measures of informal influence. We haven’t attempted to compare the list of the Top 100 HR Tech Influencers to the Additional Influencers that we find below based on Diversity, but this is still helpful context to keep in mind. At this point, we also think it’s important to note that this analysis is not in any way intended to be a criticism of the existing list of the Top 100 HR Tech Influencers or the methodology behind - there are likely a number of additional considerations that went into preparing that list and we see this approach as complementary rather than as a criticism.

After bringing this network into Polinode, the second step in identifying the Additional Influencers was to apply a community detection algorithm. We used the Louvain Communities detection algorithm that partitions the network into groups of nodes that are more closely connected with each other than they are to the rest of the network. The image below shows the result of applying this algorithm to our network.

You may click on the image above to view a larger version of it. We have made this network publicly available in Polinode so you may also click the following link to view a live version of this network in Polinode which you can explore and interact with: https://app.polinode.com/networks/explore/651d0353801c90001173f974/651e6127801c9000117443ca

For the purposes of identifying the Additional Influencers, we limited ourselves to the two communities in the center or core of the network - the pink Community 1 and the orange Community 4.

The final step was then to calculate the number of incoming connections for each individual in these two groups. We then selected the 30 individuals with the highest number of incoming connections in these two communities who had not already been identified in the group of the Top 100 HR Tech Influencers, i.e. who were not seed nodes. We decided to cap the list at 30 to keep it relatively concise and used alphabetical order as a tie breaker for spot 30. The interactive view below summarizes the results - the green nodes are the 30 identified Additional Influencers, the blue nodes are the Top 100 HR Tech Influencers (that remain in the core of the network) and the gray nodes are other identified profiles in the network. We have added labels in this network view to those Additional Influencers with more than 12 incoming connections.

You may click on the image above to view a larger version of it. We have made this network publicly available in Polinode so you may also click the following link to view a live version of this network in Polinode which you can explore and interact with: https://app.polinode.com/networks/explore/651d0353801c90001173f974/651e6b87801c900011744611

We have summarized the list of 30 identified Additional Influencers in the table below in descending order of the number of incoming connections they have and with links to their LinkedIn profile pages:

If you found this blog post interesting and would like to stay in touch, please follow Polinode on LinkedIn and turn on notifications for new posts. If you will be at HR Tech this week, please feel free to stop by our booth (#1433). We will have an interactive version of this network on a big screen at our booth. If you are not attending HR Tech and would like to learn more about what we do, please do feel free to get in touch via info@polinode.com.