LinkedIn announced the launch of a new app for businesses called LinkedIn Lookup aimed at helping people more easily find, learn about, and contact coworkers.

The company says it learned earlier this year that about 30% of members who search for people on LinkedIn each month view their coworkers profiles and that 38% said their companies’ intranets are effective at helping them learn about them. 58% said they could do a better job if they could find coworkers with specific skills.

In a blog post, LinkedIn’s Ankit Gupta explains how Lookup works:

Let’s say I recently met a person on our corporate communications team whose input I’d like on a product I’m developing, but I can’t remember her name. No problem! With Lookup I can search for coworkers by name, title, current and past experience, education, and skills. Since she works on our corporate communications team, I enter “Corporate Communications” in the search field, and click “search.” Lookup provides me with the photos, names, and titles of my coworkers whose LinkedIn profiles include the skill or title “corporate communications.” There she is: Julie.

I click on Julie’s profile and Lookup gives me the info that is most relevant to me: her photo, title, work experience, education, top skills, and work email address. I’d be able to see Julie’s info via Lookup even if we weren’t connected on LinkedIn. Lookup also gives me Julie’s mobile number, since she has added her contact preferences to Lookup. Contact preferences that members add to Lookup are only visible to coworkers using the app, and don’t appear on their public LinkedIn profiles. But what if Julie didn’t add her contact preferences to Lookup? I can send an email to her work address directly from Lookup, or send her a message. I simply click “Send a message,” type my message, hit “Send,” and Julie will get an alert on her mobile phone. Lookup users can message coworkers, even if they haven’t downloaded Lookup, and messages sent to coworkers’ LinkedIn inboxes via Lookup don’t count against the number of InMails members get each month.

For now, the app is only available for iOS. It’s available on the App Store. It’s unclear if and when it will hit Android.

Images via LinkedIn