INSIGHT

Do you struggle to find right people to build the path towards your dream job? With our LinkedIn extension, you can find people in your network who can help you make your career aspirations a reality.

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Inspiration

As college students navigating today’s competitive job market, we wanted to build something that could be a game-changer for career searches, especially in a time where layoffs, career pivots, and unexpected transitions are common. INSIGHT helps you visualize your network so you can take action towards building a stronger network.

What it does

We built a beautiful 3D network visualization Chrome extension that displays your LinkedIn connections as an interactive graph with advanced search and pathfinding capabilities. It maps how your connections cluster across industries, geographies, and roles. But it isn't just a pretty graphic — it was interactive. You can zoom, explore, and discover how your network connected in ways you never expected.

Our three target customers were:

  1. For job seekers – Warm introductions often make all the difference. A network map could surface hidden overlaps and unexpected bridges, helping you land those first conversations faster.
  2. For recruiters & hiring teams – Recruiting isn’t just about resumes. A network visualization could help uncover fresh talent pools by showing how industries and organizations overlap, supercharging searches within tools like LinkedIn Recruiter.
  3. For partnerships & business development – Whether you’re seeking collaborators, investors, or clients, being able to see how networks interconnect could help organizations bridge gaps and uncover new opportunities.

The Key Benefits

  1. Gain a clear view of your entire professional network
  2. Make informed outreach decisions with relationship context
  3. Quickly identify relevant contacts using AI-powered search
  4. Leverage your network's full potential without depending on team invites

Imagine a next-generation InMap feature, reimagined for today’s LinkedIn. We believe it could transform how people leverage their professional networks.

How we built it

To integrate our product with LinkedIn, we built the integration as a browser extension or LinkedIn plugin so users can instantly visualize their own networks.

Built With Three.js - 3D graphics and animations Chrome Extension Manifest V3 - Modern extension architecture Canvas 2D/WebGL - High-performance rendering ES6 Modules - Modern JavaScript architecture

Architecture Content Script - Injects the visualizer into LinkedIn pages Bundled Dependencies - All Three.js modules bundled locally for CSP compliance Modular Design - Clean separation of concerns

Research and Prototyping We used Python and Marimo for data wrangling and graph construction, with NetworkX to generate the network structure. For visualization, we experimented with Marimo to create an interactive, explorable map that users could zoom, filter, and cluster by company, geography, or role. We also layered in an AI-powered search to allow quick filtering of contacts based on skills or shared backgrounds.

Challenges we ran into

  • Data: Couldn't use LinkedIn API, so we had to scrape the data instead. Since we didn’t have real LinkedIn data at first due to having to wait 24 hours to archive our own LinkedIn data, we had to generate synthetic but realistic datasets to properly demo the tool first before we could test and scrape real LinkedIn data.
  • Graph complexity: With even a small dataset, networks became very dense. We had to experiment with layout algorithms to make clusters meaningful and visually clear.
  • Clustering logic: Deciding how to group nodes (by company, role, or geography) while keeping the visualization useful required trade-offs.
  • Interactivity: Making the network more than just a static graph was tricky, especially balancing performance with zooming and filtering.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Built an interactive visualization that went beyond static graphs.
  • Created a way to highlight clusters by industry, role, or geography in a way that’s instantly understandable.
  • Designed a solution that could have real-world impact for job seekers, recruiters, and business developers.
  • Learned how to integrate graph visualization with interactivity in a hackathon timeframe.

What we learned

  • How powerful visual context can be when exploring networks — it revealed patterns we didn’t expect.
  • The importance of user-centric design: recruiters, job seekers, and business developers have overlapping but different needs.
  • New technical skills in graph visualization, clustering, and interactive dashboards.

What's next for INSIGHT

  • Scalability: Optimize for larger, real-world datasets with thousands of nodes.
  • AI-driven insights: Recommend who to reach out to next or hidden pathways into a company or industry.
  • Custom filters: Let users explore by seniority, location, skills, or mutual connections.
  • Premium value: Position this as a tool for recruiters, business developers, and ambitious job seekers to unlock the real power of their networks.

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