Category Archives: LinkedIn

LinkedIn’s New Non-Boolean Search Functionality

I originally published this post on LinkedIn, but am reposting here to ensure my blog readers catch it.

When I attended LinkedIn’s Talent Connect 2015 conference in Anaheim, CA and I was able to take some video of Eddie Vivas, Head of Talent Solutions Product for LinkedIn, formerly the Founder and Chief Product Officer at Bright.com (acquired by LinkedIn), talking about and briefly demonstrating LinkedIn Recruiter’s new search interface and functionality.

Check it out – be sure to switch to 1080p and go full screen.

As Eddie says at 1:35 into the video, “You guys ready to see some cool shit?”

I’ve attended and spoken at every Talent Connect event, and I’ve been waiting 5 long years for LinkedIn to make some major changes to their search interface and functionality.

Whatever you think of LinkedIn, they have a ton of professional human capital data, and the value of data is directly proportional to the ability of users to quickly, easily and precisely retrieve actionable data.

The more easily recruiters can quickly and precisely retrieve profiles of people who have a decent probability of being the right match and also likely to respond to outreach efforts, the more actionable (and thus valuable) LinkedIn’s data becomes.

Although the video and a few other assets I share below don’t show you everything that’s coming to the new Recruiter search experience, I’m going to run through a few things that will definitely make LinkedIn’s data more actionable than ever before for recruiters, and none of them involve Boolean search.

Dynamic Semantic Search Suggestions

LinkedIn claims Recruiter’s new search “learns as you go,” dynamically adjusting suggested synonymous and related search terms as you enter new terms.

Think of this as LinkedIn Skills on steroids and integrated seamlessly and practically into the search experience.

As you add search terms, Recruiter will provide you with a list of the top titles, skills, companies and schools associated with your target candidates and you can choose to incorporate the suggestions into your search (or not).

I’m presuming that as you add search terms they effectively create Boolean “OR” statements whereby results will match at least one of the terms.

Historically, I’ve referred to this as conceptual search or Level 2 Talent Mining. While very effective, the challenge for most people is that they don’t know all of the various ways in which people with specific skills and experience might make mention of them, leading recruiters to craft searches that actually create Dark Matter.

Based on what I can see, this new Recruiter functionality should go a long way in reducing LinkedIn’s Dark Matter, helping people build more inclusive searches by automatically suggesting additional potentially relevant search terms to return results of people who would likely not ever be found via traditional keyword search, given the wide variety of ways people can express the same skills and experience.

LinkedIn Profile Matching

You will also be able to find potential candidates using an employee’s (and perhaps anyone’s?) profile.

Essentially using a profile to automatically build a search – Recruiter’s new functionality will:

Automatically build your search string using the job title, skills, company, and industry, listed on the employee’s profile. It will show you the terms it used to build the search string, let you add or remove terms, and instantly update the list of members who meet your search criteria – helping you quickly identify the members who are a match for your open job.

I can’t wait to get my hands on this to see how well it actually performs.

Search Spotlights

This is what I am most excited about – Recruiter’s new search will offer users the ability to quickly and easily filter results by potential candidates who (LinkedIn claims) are 2-3X more likely to engage, based on relationships and interactions on LinkedIn, including:

Company connections
Past applicants
People engaged with your company on LinkedIn
People in your competitors’ talent pool (“Who your competitors target”)
Who’s potentially ready for a move – people who have been in their current role for 1-5 years
Interested candidates – people who have indicated to LinkedIn that they are open to new opportunities

I find these last 2 to be especially interesting and particularly useful- I’ve been wondering how and when LinkedIn would allow people to show recruiters they are open to new opportunities.

Granted, 1-5 years is a HUGE window and may not be as predictive or precise as some would like, but it’s a start. Also, I am not sure why LinkedIn wouldn’t offer a spotlight showing you only people who are within 30-60 days of their work anniversary – company and/or title – as this is a time when many people think about their future and could be more open to making a change.

Eddie claims they are launching with 7 different spotlights, hinting that perhaps more spotlights are likely coming in the future.

Introducing the Next Generation of LinkedIn Recruiter from LinkedIn Talent Solutions

But What About Boolean?

Don’t worry – LinkedIn claims that “Advanced recruiters can continue to use their own Boolean search strings.”

However, as I’ve always stated, effective search isn’t about Boolean logic – it’s about information retrieval, and I am excited to see LinkedIn provide users with additional, and what appear to be practically useful and effective, means of retrieving a higher quantity (through more inclusive search) of relevant results – people who have a higher probability of being the right match and more likely to respond to recruiters.

When is it Coming and What Do You Think?

Apparently LinkedIn has and/or will beta launch the new Recruiter search functionality to select customers in Q4 2015, and a general launch is planned for Q1 2016.

From a few folks who have been lucky enough to play around with the new search functionality this year, I’ve heard it’s not “fully baked” yet, but I don’t find that surprising.

What do you think about these new Recruiter search enhancements?

Video: My thoughts on Sourcing & the Future of Recruiting

3 Replies

At LinkedIn’s 2014 Talent Connect event in San Francisco, I had the opportunity to be interviewed on the topic of up-skilling recruiting teams.

Watch this short video to hear my thoughts on the ideal sourcing/recruiting team alignment, critical skills for any recruiting team, and the future of recruiting (hint – it has something to do with data).

Insights from LinkedIn’s 2015 Global Recruiting Survey

16 Replies

Job boards vs. social media: What’s the most significant source of hire for companies globally?

LinkedIn recently surveyed over 4,000 talent acquisition leaders in 31 countries, gaining insights into source of hire, quality of hire, quantity of hire, talent brand, the future of recruiting and more, so if you haven’t already downloaded and reviewed LinkedIn’s 2015 Global Recruiting Trends e-book, I highly recommend you do so by clicking here.

While I’m going to share a few of the insights from the Global Recruiting Trends e-book (including the job boards vs. social recruiting), I highly encourage you to compare them with LinkedIn’s country specific recruiting and staffing e-books (Southeast Asia, Australia, India, U.K., Italy, Belgium, etc.) which can be found here. There are some significant differences, specifically when it comes to source of hire.

Continue reading →

How to Get Unlimited LinkedIn InMails

25 Replies

What does LinkedIn’s new InMail policy mean for you? That depends on how effective your InMails are and the response rates you can achieve.

If you have a premium account with LinkedIn and haven’t been living under a rock, you are aware of LinkedIn’s InMail policy change which will, for most people, reduce the total number of InMails they are able to send.

However, their new policy does open up the possibility of unlimited InMails, provided you can achieve a 100% response rate.

Yes, it really is that simple. :)

Of course, even for folks with ridiculously effective messaging, there are a number of reasons why it is practically impossible to get a 100% response rate (e.g., people respond via email instead of through LinkedIn, people not logging into LinkedIn for long periods of time, people simply ignoring InMails, etc.).

However, if you can figure out how to get a much higher than average rate of response, you can actually end up with more InMails under LinkedIn’s new policy than the old.

Let me show you. Continue reading →

LinkedIn Recruiter Search Result Discrepancies Explored

11 Replies

LinkedIn search results can be different across free and premium accounts, including Recruiter

Irina posted an interesting piece on discrepancies in search results between LinkedIn Recruiter and a free LinkedIn account which prompted me to do a little digging as I don’t think I’ve ever come across materially different results in actual use.

While the discrepancies are definitely interesting, and I would love to know exactly what’s causing them, I don’t find them particularly troubling. Read on to learn why.

Even if you don’t have a LinkedIn Recruiter license, you will likely still find this post interesting, as it examines search logic and strategy which can be applied to sourcing via any site/resource.

In the C++ 3D iOS “computer games” example, where a free account returns 150 results and an LinkedIn Recruiter account returns 43, I wouldn’t recommend anyone to search for “computer games” as a keyword as it is too limiting. If the goal is to find people who develop computer games, I would run a broader, more inclusive keyword search than exact phrase of “computer games,” which many people who actually develop games would not use in their LinkedIn profile. Continue reading →

View Full Names on LinkedIn for Free with LIPPL

10 Replies

I am pleased to share a cool and very practical free Chrome extension that allows you to quickly and easily view the public profiles of LinkedIn members beyond your 2nd degree network, thus showing you their full name.

Victor Soroka first shared Lippl with me back in January. I had the honor of meeting him while at LinkedIn’s Talent Connect 2012 in London and apparently Victor has been busy working on a great way to view the public profiles of practically anyone on LinkedIn.

Once you’ve installed the Lippl Chrome extension, all you have to do is open the Lippl sidebar and click “open.” It works by automatically opening up the person’s public LinkedIn profile in a new Incognito window, so even if you’re logged into LinkedIn, LinkedIn can’t tell whether or not you “know” the person (within 1st or 2nd degree) – as such, you can see their full name. Continue reading →

LinkedIn Represents Over 60% of U.S. Non Farm Employment

2 Replies

In certain sourcing and recruiting circles, it’s in vogue to say that you shouldn’t rely heavily on LinkedIn for your talent acquisition needs.

In fact, some people will go so far as to say that LinkedIn is “overfished” for talent and that recruiters are lazy if they use LinkedIn as their primary source of potential candidates. Whenever I hear that kind of sentiment, I simply have to laugh. LinkedIn’s latest stats claim 93M+ U.S. profiles.

To believe that a talent pool the size of LinkedIn’s is “overfished” is like saying the Pacific Ocean is overfished, that you can’t find fish in the Pacific Ocean that others haven’t already caught, and that you would be lazy to fish in the Pacific Ocean. Yeah – there’s just too many fish in the Pacific Ocean…we should go find some other place to fish. Right.

You might be surprised to learn that most people find, review and take action on less than 20% of LinkedIn’s users, but that’s the topic of a separate post I will write in the near future. In the meantime, contemplate my claim.

LinkedIn Represents Over 60% of U.S. Non Farm Employment

Let me share with you an interesting statistic I recently calculated and shared at SourceCon in Atlanta. The U.S. Bureau of Labor and Statistics is showing preliminary figures for total non farm employment in January 2014 at 137,500,000 (I rounded up). Continue reading →

Keep Calm & Message On: LinkedIn Group Messaging Still Free

11 Replies

There were a number of tweets, blog posts and online discussions late last week that stirred up a great deal of confusion over whether or not you would soon still be able to send free messages to fellow group group members on LinkedIn. I’ve got the straight dope from LinkedIn and will demonstrate with multiple screenshots what is still free for everyone and what is not going to be free for LinkedIn Recruiter license holders.

I believe the confusion began with emails LinkedIn recently sent out to Recruiter license holders explaining that they will be disabling the ability to send free InMails to group members from LinkedIn Recruiter as of January 14th.

Based on the chatter online, some people seem to have incorrectly interpreted this to mean that no one will be able to send free messages to fellow group members on LinkedIn.com any more (see example image at the bottom of the post).

This tweet from LinkedIn cleared up the confusion for me on Friday:

However, as I began to write this post, I came across several examples of people I know claiming they spoke with LinkedIn reps who said free group messaging was being eliminated for everyone. Even though I was quite confident that @HireOnLinkedIn knew her stuff, I decided to check with her one last time:

Within 2 hours of that tweet (on Sunday!), I received an email from a Senior LinkedIn PMM copying several other LinkedIn folks definitively clarifying that free group messaging on LinkedIn isn’t going anywhere:

As you have noticed (and commented in Social Media), we have disabled the ability send to FREE InMails to Fellow Group Members from Linked Recruiter. This Change is only applicable to LinkedIn Recruiter customers (not LinkedIn members).

Background: When the feature was launched in LinkedIn Recruiter several years ago, the intention was to provide members with an opportunity to connect and share ideas within groups while enabling recruiters to participate and find talent. Based on a recent analysis, we have noticed that this feature is being used in ways we hadn’t anticipated, often creating negative experiences for both members and recruiters.

Here are some additional clarification points.

1. Free Group messaging is and WILL CONTINUE TO BE AVAILABLE to all LinkedIn members

2. All group members CAN continue to send messages to fellow group members on LinkedIn.com

3. LinkedIn Recruiter customers CAN continue to send InMails to fellow group members but these InMails will be deducted from their allotted InMail credits.

Finally to answer your tweet: Free group messaging isn’t going away for any member.

Hope this clarifies any confusion.

It certainly clears things up for me.

Screenshots: LinkedIn InMails to Fellow Group Members

This is what will no longer be free – from LinkedIn Recruiter ONLY, as of January 14th:

Prior to the change LinkedIn is instituting, this is what you would see when attempting to send a message to someone with whom you have a group in common:

After the change, this is what it will look like to LinkedIn Recruiter users even if they do have a group in common with the person they are trying to message:

Screenshots: Free LinkedIn Group Messaging

When you’re on LinkedIn.com and in a LinkedIn group and you want to send a message to someone, even if they aren’t connected to you in any way other than sharing the same group, you will still be able to send free messages to anyone who hasn’t disabled the ability.

When you click “send message,” here is what you will continue to see:

So keep calm and message on.

I should remind you that LinkedIn group members can elect to not allow other group members to send them messages via LinkedIn. Here is where users can find this group messaging setting:

Free LinkedIn Sourcing Webinar Wednesday November 20 @ 2PM ET

2 Replies

When you search LinkedIn, are you finding top talent, or simply those people who are easiest to find?

Would you know the difference?

While some people firmly believe that LinkedIn is “over fished,” I can confidently tell you that nothing is further from the truth.

In fact, what if I told you that you routinely find only a fraction of the people that can be found on LinkedIn?

Now that LinkedIn has grown to over 259,000,000 registered users, finding people has become much easier, but finding the right people becomes increasingly more challenging, and finding all of them even harder. As such, knowing how to effectively source talent on LinkedIn is now more important than ever.

During Wednesday’s LinkedIn sourcing webinar, I’ll review advanced human capital data retrieval concepts, techniques and strategies that you can leverage in LinkedIn Recruiter, including Dark Matter, Maximum Inclusion, Adaptive Search, Strategic Exclusion, Intelligent Results Processing, and Moneyball Sourcing.

Be sure to attend this LinkedIn webinar live, because this session won’t be recorded and the slides won’t be distributed afterwards.

Also, I simply have to recognize the LinkedIn team’s graphic designer for putting this “Lord of the Strings” image together – I’m a huge LOTR fan.

Although I like the concept of Gandalf, Legolas, Gimli and Aragorn having my back in the war for talent, I think I’ll stick with my shaved head. :)

Some Very Interesting Google / LinkedIn X-Ray Search Results

14 Replies

While I was writing last week’s post in which I explored using Google to X-Ray search within specific LinkedIn groups, I decided to perform some general X-Ray search syntax testing to challenge some assumptions, as well as to compare X-Ray results to LinkedIn Recruiter results.

I notice quite a few folks seem to use the “people you know” phrase when using Google to search LinkedIn, and I wanted to see if it was better than other phrases/techniques for isolating LinkedIn profiles and eliminating non-profile false positive results.

I ran 4 searches that were suitably limiting to get a manageable number of results back to back, only changing one aspect of the each search – how to target profiles and eliminate non-profile results:

I scraped the total results from each search and sorted them in Excel so I could compare them for any variations.

When you look at the chart below, you’ll notice there is very little difference between the 4 different X-Ray searches, but the fact that there are differences at all is interesting. While the searches only vary from 22 to 24 unique results – 2 is 9% of 22. Also, notice that some searches have results that others don’t and one search had duplicate results (“people you know”) while none of the others did.

LinkedIn Recruiter vs. Google X-Ray Search

When I ran a [sqoop pig hive] keyword search in LinkedIn Recruiter and selected a location of “Greater New York City Area,” I got 48 results – 2X or 100% more than the best Google X-Ray search above.

This is proof positive that when you X-Ray search LinkedIn, you are only finding a fraction of the results available.

Also, searching for [“location * new york city area”] does in fact find people who have a different location phrase on their profile that is included within LinkedIn’s “greater new york city area,” so this cannot explain the differences in results between LinkedIn Recruiter and Google X-Ray searching.

LinkedIn X-Ray Search Results Can Be Inconsistent

Although this was only a quick experiment, I noticed that some of my results changed from search to search, with the exact same search. Here’s an example:

Granted, that’s a small difference – 1 result out of 23 – but the fact that you can get different results from the same search within 5 minutes is a bit disturbing. It also certainly makes performing and replicating these kinds of tests challenging.

Google Can See Some Things You Can’t (at first)

When I noticed Giri’s profile popping up in the second search above, I decided to check it out.

I clicked on his profile link and noticed he is a 3rd degree connection, and because I was logged into LinkedIn, it wouldn’t show me his full profile and I could not confirm that all of my search terms (sqoop, pig, hive) were all there.

I decided to type his name into LinkedIn and pull up his profile – then I checked for my keywords. I noticed sqoop wasn’t there.

Here’s all I could see in his skills – even though it appeared as though I was looking at his full profile, I clearly wasn’t – otherwise sqoop would have to be present.

I checked his profile out in Recruiter and could see all of his skills, including sqoop.

I then tried to view Google’s cached result for Giri, but for some reason I consistently got an error and could not view it:

I then tried another person’s profile and successfully viewed this cached result, but alas, sqoop was still nowhere to be found via CTRL-F.

Confused for a moment, I right-clicked on the cached result and proceeded to view the page source. Lo and behold, sqoop was hiding in there in the “miniprofile-container jellybean” as an “extra skill:”

Now that I had found my search term, I went back to inspect the cached page to see where sqoop could possibly be hiding. I noticed “View All (50) Skills” was clickable – so I clicked it, and all of the skills were then displayed, including sqoop.

Full Location vs. Partial Location Phrase Searching

I then decided to run another 4 searches back to back – the same ones as above, but this time I put the full location phrase in the search by adding the word “greater” – [“location * greater new york city area“]

Once again I scraped the total results from each search and sorted them in Excel so I could compare them for any variations.

When you look at the chart below, you should notice:

All searches returned more results than those above – 5, 5, 1 and 4 respectively
[-pub/dir] and [site:linkedin.com/in | site:linkedin.com/pub -pub/dir] outperformed [“people you know”] and [“you know”]
[-pub/dir] and [site:linkedin.com/in | site:linkedin.com/pub -pub/dir] both returned 1 false positive result of a job
For some reason [site:linkedin.com/in | site:linkedin.com/pub -pub/dir] returned quite a few duplicate results when combined with [“location * greater new york city area”] vs. [“location* new york city area”]
When de-duped, [site:linkedin.com/in | site:linkedin.com/pub -pub/dir] returned the same search results as [-pub/dir]
“people you know” had the least number of results (again)

Final Thoughts

From my very basic testing it appears that using the full LinkedIn location phrase, e.g. [location * greater new york city area”] is important for maximum inclusion, even though the asterisk in [location * new york city area”] should “cover” the word “greater.”

You may want to reconsider using the phrase “people you know” in your LinkedIn X-Ray searches to target profiles, as both of my tests showed it had the worst performance compared to other phrases/syntax.

Interestingly, simply using “you know” works at least as well as “”people you know,” and in fact outperformed “people you know” – at least in my quick and dirty comparison tests.

[-pub/dir] appears to work as well as, and in some cases better than, [site:linkedin.com/in | site:linkedin.com -dir].

As I’ve implored many times before, please don’t just copy and paste other people’s search syntax – it’s easy and it may seem painless, but there can be consequences, such as getting fewer result than you could otherwise.

Please experiment more! Yes, putting even this minor experiment together was quite tedious – at least the results scraping, formatting and comparison – but as you can see, some discoveries were made that likely could never have been had I not painstakingly compared different searches back to back.

Finally, you certainly can’t find everyone on LinkedIn through X-Ray searching – you could be missing up to and even potentially more than half of the LinkedIn profiles that actually exist, for the reasons I detailed thoroughly in the middle of this post.

Using Google to Search for People in Specific LinkedIn Groups

11 Replies

In this post, I am going to share with you the journey I took and the discoveries I made while investigating the answer to a Boolean search request for help I recently came across online about using -dir in a Google X-Ray search of LinkedIn. Some of you may enjoy and appreciate seeing my methodology, others will likely learn a thing or two about using Google to search for people in specific LinkedIn groups, and I’ll remind you of a few reasons why you can’t find everyone on LinkedIn using Google, Bing or any search engine other than LinkedIn’s.

Here’s the original search that was shared in the request for help:

site:linkedin.com “Front end developers group” (.Net |dot Net) Greater Boston Area) -dir -job -jobs -sample -samples -template -resume service -resume writers -resume writing

I was going to quickly answer with a cleaned-up search string, but what really caught my attention was that he was trying to target folks in a specific LinkedIn group.

Now, I have a LinkedIn Recruiter license and I don’t often X-Ray LinkedIn to find specific group members, so I poked around a bit on the topic and found this little gem posted by Balazs, my former partner in world sourcing domination, back in 2011:

Here’s the sample string Balazs offered: site:linkedin.com inurl:(in | pub) “logo Boolean strings” -inurl:dir

I used his search and noticed the total number of results was very low (only 2 pages) and also that there were many false positive, non-profile results. It was clear that much has changed since Balazs wrote the above post nearly 3 years ago and that, among other things, “logo GROUP NAME” no longer works as it once used to.

As such, I decided to take a look into one of the actual profile results and view the cached version to see what Google was hitting on.

Then I right clicked to viewed the page’s source:

Here’s what I saw after using CTRL-F to search for the word “Boolean:”

You can see that the the logo image is followed by the phrase “Boolean Strings – the Internet Sourcing Community logo.”

Here’s the specific piece of code:

So, in order to leverage that specific format/order of words, I constructed a quick search targeting the LinkedIn group that the person from the original question that caught my eye was trying to target, which was the Front End Developers group, using “Front End Developers Group logo” in the string:

site:linkedin.com “front end developers logo” (C# |.Net) “location * Greater Boston Area”

Google estimates 83 results:

However, you should never pay attention to Google’s “About XX” results. If you click to page 2, you can see there are really only 11 results.

I then decided to check LinkedIn Recruiter looking for people who live in the Greater Boston Area and either mention C# or .Net, and, using LinkedIn’s brilliant Any Group functionality, I searched for members of the Front End Developers Group.

Surprise, surprise – I got 11 results:

However, while the number matches between Google and LinkedIn, the people do not.

Interesting, yes?

That opens up a whole different can of worms, so to speak.

Google is not an All Seeing Eye

Keep in mind that people have the option to not show the logo of a group they’re in on their LinkedIn profile.

If someone chooses not to display the group logo on their profile, then you won’t be able to use Google to find people in the manner demonstrated above presumably because the logo (and associated logo phrase) won’t be on their public profile. If it’s not there to be “seen” by Google, you can’t retrieve it.

Additionally, let’s not forget that:

1. Some people’s LinkedIn profiles are invisible to search engines which means you can’t X-Ray search them. People can choose to make their public profile “visible to no one” (see the image below for LinkedIn public profile content settings), meaning their profiles are not crawlable/indexable by search engines and thus cannot be retrieved.

2. Even if people choose to make their public profile “visible to everyone,” if they select “Basics,” the only things that LinkedIn allows search engines to “see” are a person’s name, industry, location and number of recommendations. That means you can’t retrieve their profiles if you search for anything beyond their name, industry, and location. These folks could actually display group logos on their profiles, but searching for group logos won’t retrieve them because LinkedIn isn’t allowing search engines to “see” them.

3. Even if someone chooses to make their public profile visible to everyone and they don’t select “Basics,” they can still pick and choose from a long list of things that can or cannot be “seen” by search engines. Anything a person decides to not make visible can’t be found/retrieved with Google, Bing, etc., – this can include groups, skills, summaries, current and past positions, and more.

Another Way to X-Ray Search for and Target LinkedIn Groups

While writing this post, I stumbled across a specific question about how to use a Boolean search in Google to target members of a specific LinkedIn group. Lois Grimshaw responded to the question, and I noticed that she took a different approach than using the “GROUP NAME logo” phrase – she used “logo * GROUP NAME.” I added java to the search to get the results down to a more manageable number for testing:

site:linkedin.com “people you know” “logo * Ernst & Young Employees and Alumni” java

I scrolled to the last page of results to see that Google returned 461 results:

I then decided to run the same search, but use my “GROUP NAME logo” phrase format, shortening it to “Young Employees and Alumni logo,” because there isn’t any other group that uses the same specific phrase, there is actually no need to include “Ernst &.” I also happen to be a fan of minimalist strings.

site:linkedin.com “people you know” “Young Employees and Alumni logo” java

That search returned more results – 496.

In case you were curious, I decided to also test this search format:

site:linkedin.com “people you know” “Ernst * Young Employees and Alumni logo” java – 480 results.

I then decided to check on LinkedIn using my Recruiter license – 735 results.

For the many reasons I listed above, I wasn’t surprised to find significantly more people using LinkedIn’s search than I did using Google.

Group Search: Asterisk vs. Straight Phrase

I decided to go back to my original Front End Developers group search and use Lois’s “logo * GROUP NAME” search approach to see how the results differed from my simple “GROUP NAME logo” phrase search:

site:linkedin.com “logo * front end developers” (C# |.Net) “location * Greater Boston Area”

If you got to page 2, you can see that the search returns a total of 15 results, which is 4 more than my original search.

Works better, right?

Not so fast – in this case, using the asterisk allowed additional groups to get returned, such as the Chicago Front-End Web Developers group…

…and the Front End Web Developers – CA group.

One could argue that scooping up some additional groups is a good thing, and in this case, that is actually true (both folks live in Boston even though the groups are for locations other than Boston).

However, it’s easy to see that using the asterisk in a group-targeting search can have unintended consequences, and it’s not difficult to imagine scenarios in which irrelevant results could be returned.

Unique LinkedIn Group Name Search

Lastly, I’d like to point out that if the name of the LinkedIn group you’re interested in searching for is unique, you may not even need to use the word “logo” in your search.

For example – all 3 of these searches return 27 pages of results:

No mention of logo:

site:linkedin.com “boolean strings – the Internet Sourcing Community” “location * greater atlanta” “people you know” – 27 pages of results

“GROUP NAME logo”

site:linkedin.com “boolean strings – the Internet Sourcing Community logo” “location * greater atlanta” “people you know” – 27 pages of results

“logo * GROUP NAME”

site:linkedin.com “logo * boolean strings – the Internet Sourcing Community” “location * greater atlanta” “people you know” – 27 pages of results

The Boolean Search Bottom Line(s)

1. Be curious! Don’t just copy, paste and implicitly trust other people’s search strings – take the time to tinker with them to understand why and how they work (or don’t!), and to improve upon/simply them.

2. Don’t pay any attention to an Internet search engine’s estimate of the number of results on page 1- always navigate to the last page of results to get the real number, especially when comparing alternative search strings.

3. Always, always, always inspect search results below the surface and look for patterns to make sure your searches are working precisely the way you intended. If they’re not, it’s an excellent opportunity to learn by tweaking your searches and watching how the volume of your results varies and how your results get more or less relevant, and specifically why.

4. There are often many different ways of achieving the same search / information retrieval / sourcing goals – very seldom are Boolean search strings “right” or “wrong,” although there can be a wide variance in the volume, relevance and inclusiveness between seemingly similar searches.

5. The “GROUP NAME logo” phrase search works well for using Google to search for people within specific LinkedIn groups, and for unique group names, you don’t even need to use the word “logo” in your search.

6. You can’t find everyone on LinkedIn using Google, Bing or any search engine other than LinkedIn’s. One could argue that perhaps some of the best people on LinkedIn are unfindable via X-Ray search because, as highly sought after passive talent, they’ve taken steps to limit what, if anything, Internet search engines can “see.”

LinkedIn Certification, Talent Connect and Boolean NOT Update

3 Replies

LinkedIn Recruiter Certification

In case you missed it, LinkedIn has launched a recruiter certification program!

If you think you’re ready to get certified, between now and December 31, 2013, LinkedIn will waive the exam fee for the first 500 customers that register for the LinkedIn Certified Professional—Recruiter certification exam. Click/see the coupon code below:

Before you attempt to take the certification assessment, you will definitely want to see what I only recently discovered about LinkedIn’s support of Boolean search exclusion operator (NOT vs. Minus sign) – skip to the bottom of the post to learn more.

LinkedIn Talent Connect

I’m honored to be presenting again at both Talent Connect events this month in Vegas as well as Talent Connect London, which happens to be the largest corporate recruiting event in Europe.

The event in Vegas is sold out, but you can view the live stream – click here to to register.

I will be presenting two sessions on LinkedIn talent sourcing on Wednesday the 16th in Vegas and one session on Thursday the 24th in London, covering core principles and advanced strategies.

Now that LinkedIn has grown to over 238M profiles, finding people has become easier, but finding the right people has actually become more challenging. As such, knowing how to effectively source talent on LinkedIn is now more important than ever. In the foundation session, I’ll be reviewing information retrieval best practices, the importance of understanding the behavior of the people you’re looking for and that of your competitors, and how to develop the ability to ask better questions with Boolean logic. In the advanced session, I will cover Dark Matter concepts, Maximum Inclusion, Adaptive Search, Strategic Exclusion, and Moneyball Sourcing.

LinkedIn Boolean Search Exclusion: NOT vs. the Minus Sign

You may recall that I broke the story on LinkedIn’s undocumented Boolean search operator over two years ago.

In preparation for the LinkedIn Recruiter Certification, I inquired with the team at LinkedIn about any differences between the Boolean NOT operator and the minus sign (-).

They responded, and you should know that LinkedIn officially only supports the NOT operator for exclusion, as there are some “corner cases” in which the minus sign will not work for exclusion – this is true for searching LinkedIn for free as well as for LinkedIn Recruiter.

Now, if you’re a fan of words like I am, you may especially appreciate their specific use of the term “corner case,” which clearly came from their engineers. If you’re unfamiliar with the term, Wikipedia offers an excellent explanation:

A corner case (or pathological case) is a problem or situation that occurs only outside of normal operating parameters—specifically one that manifests itself when multiple environmental variables or conditions are simultaneously at extreme levels, even though each parameter is within the specified range for that parameter.

For example, a loudspeaker might distort audio, but only when played at maximum volume, maximum bass, and in a high-humidity environment. Or a computer server may be unreliable, but only with the maximum complement of 64processors, 512 GB of memory, and 10,000 signed-on users.

Contrast a corner case with an edge case, an issue that occurs only at a (single) maximum or minimum parameter. For example, a speaker that distorts audio at maximum volume, even in the absence of other extreme settings or conditions.

Corner cases are part of an engineer‘s lexicon—especially an engineer involved in testing or debugging a complex system. Corner cases are often harder and more expensive to reproduce, test, and optimize because they require maximal configurations in multiple dimensions. They are frequently less-tested, given the belief that few product users will, in practice, exercise the product at multiple simultaneous maximum settings. Expert users of systems therefore routinely find corner case anomalies, and in many of these, errors.

Mind you, you can still use the minus sign in lieu of the Boolean NOT operator to exclude terms and OR statements, but be advised that there are some rare scenarios where the minus sign won’t work.

Now, I’ve personally never encountered a situation in which the minus sign did not work exactly as the NOT operator, so what are the corner cases in which the minus sign won’t work?

Ah, you know I have already asked the LinkedIn team…I am eagerly awaiting their response.

LinkedIn Traffic Statistics and User Demographics 2013

7 Replies

Would you like to know more about LinkedIn’s user demographics, mobile traffic, and LinkedIn’s visitor statistics broken down by country, city, and state?

How about real-time LinkedIn unique visitors and page views per second?

http://youtu.be/hvd7riHUFM8

If so, you’ve come to the right place! Continue reading →

List of U.S. Location Phrases on LinkedIn

43 Replies

Last week I was assisting a team in building an exhaustive sourcing strategy for identifying, contacting and pipelining a consistent and continual weekly flow of highly specialized software engineers and 13 other hiring profiles that all allow for nationwide relocation.

If you’ve never been faced with such a challenge – imagine sourcing the entire U.S. (or any large country) on LinkedIn.

How would you begin?

Aside from the fun of ensuring that all of the searches returned less than 1,000 results per search, or at most ~3,000 provided I was able to use facets to divide up the results into sub-1,000, mutually exclusive result sets, I had to think about how I would enable a team to methodically and systematically uncover every potentially qualified candidate in the entire United States.

I quickly abandoned the idea of trying to use zip code searches – it’s an impractical and poor approach for many reasons. Systematically searching all of the metro areas on LinkedIn is a better approach, ensuring maximum inclusion, as I am fairly confident that regardless of zip code, everyone rolls up into a metro area.

Of course, to accomplish this, it would be helpful to have a list of all of LinkedIn’s metro area location phrases so I would not have to ask the team to perform exploratory search and type in cities and see what LinkedIn brings up, or search a wide radius from specific zip codes and make note of all of the metro areas that appear on profiles within that radius.

I decided to ask the fine folks in my networks on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter if anyone already had built or possessed such a list.

A few folks quickly replied that if I did get such a list, they would be very interested in seeing it.

As it turns out, only 1 person in my network produced a list – Zac Paeth, and he graciously gave me permission to share it with anyone who would benefit.

Thanks Zac!

After some quick research, I can verify that this isn’t a 100% complete list (e.g., it doesn’t mention the “Pocatella, Idaho Area” – ha!).

However, it does have over 90 location phrases and it seems to have most, if not all of the major metro areas.

If you have a list that differs from this one and and you’re willing to share, please do!

How LinkedIn Search Actually Works

LinkedIn Sourcing Ninja Webinar Recording now on YouTube

1 Reply

In case you missed my record-setting LinkedIn sourcing webinar on 6/4 (3,000+ attendees!), the fine folks at LinkedIn recorded the whole session and have graciously uploaded the presentation to YouTube, where you can find the Become a Sourcing Ninja: Earn your Boolean Black Belt with Glen Cathey video.

Be sure to change the quality to 720 for the best viewing experience.

Content covered includes:

Boolean search operators and query modifiers supported by LinkedIn
Beyond Boolean – asking better questions
Human-Computer Information Retrieval (HCIR)
Hidden Talent Pools
Diversity sourcing (gender demonstrated)
Agile Sourcing Methodology
Probabilisitic and Exhaustive Sourcing
Sourcing Capability Maturity Model
LinkedIn Signal
How to automatically find people who have just joined LinkedIn

Happy hunting!

The Top 100 Most Connected People on LinkedIn

100 Replies

I’ve compiled a list of the top 100 most connected people on LinkedIn, who represent the top .000044% of LinkedIn’s reported 225 million+ registered users.

Here are a few interesting facts:

There are only 5 women in the top 100, but 2 are in the top 10, and a total of 4 are in the top 20
The U.S. accounts for more than half of the top 100 (55)
The other 45 members represent the following 15 countries: U.K. (11), India (6), Netherlands (5), Canada (5), Brazil (5), Australia (3), U.A.E. (2), Turkey (1), Spain (1), South Africa (1), Israel (1), Singapore (1), Venezuela (1), Monacao (1), and France (1)
As might be suspected, a solid percentage of the top 100 are in staffing/recruiting/HR (28%). Other highly represented industries include I.T., Management Consulting, Financial Services, and Marketing and Advertising.
Beyond those top 5, the industry diversity in the top 100 is quite broad, including Logistics and Supply Chain, Telecommunications, Wine and Spirits, Construction, Transportation, Internet, Online Media, Think Tanks, Venture Capital, Utilities, Aviation and Aerospace, Computer and Network Security, Research, Translation and Localization, Photography, Mining and Metals, Real Estate, Security and Investigations, Public Policy, Accounting, Pharmaceuticals, and Non-Profit.

You might be surprised to know that it takes at least 36,000 1st degree connections to crack the top 10.

If you try to send invitations to connect with these folks, don’t be upset if they aren’t accepted – some of them simply can’t be.

Once you hit the 30,000 1st degree connection mark, LinkedIn won’t allow you to accept invitations to connect – so any connections added past that point must be invitations sent out to others to accept.

And so, without further ado, here is the list of the top 100 most connected people on LinkedIn: Continue reading →

How to Find Your LinkedIn Network Statistics

13 Replies

Do you *really* know the size of your LinkedIn network?

While everyone can easily find the number of their 1st degree connections and estimated total network size on their LinkedIn home page…

…LinkedIn has long since removed the “Network Statistics” feature that allowed you to see their estimate of your 2nd and 3rd degree networks.

If you recall, this is what it used to look like (I had to dig this image up from a few years back):

LinkedIn Network Statistics Lives!

I know I can’t be the only one missing the ability to see LinkedIn network statistics broken down by first, second, and third degree.

That’s why I am so I am happy to share some good news – a coworker in the Netherlands recently shared with me that the network statistics link actually still works.

http://www.linkedin.com/network?trk=hb_tab_net

Granted, the figures listed for your second and third degree network are only estimates – here’s proof. More on that in a bit.

Unfortunately, if your network is quite large, the link might not actually work for you. Sadly, it doesn’t work for me – I get an unexpected error every time.

Just curious – would the error not ever be “unexpected?”

Of course, because LinkedIn no longer supports your network statistics, they can pull the plug on the link I’m sharing with you at any time.

Another Method for Determining Your Network Statistics: LinkedIn Search

If you’re like me and the LinkedIn Network Statistics link doesn’t work for you, there is another way to determine your 2nd degree network.

Simply enter a special, non-searchable character (I use an asterisk) in the first name field, select “Anywhere” as the location and hit search.

You can do this with a free LinkedIn account as well as with LinkedIn Recruiter, although with Recruiter, you will get evidence that you are effectively searching the entire LinkedIn network, as evidenced by the 200M+ results. LinkedIn Recruiter:

If you are searching with a free account, you will get a much smaller number – not sure why:

Regardless of the type of LinkedIn account you’re using, go down and look at the relationship facet, and you can see the number of your “2nd Connections” and even your Group connections, although sadly, these are not Group-ONLY connections.

Unlike the figures listed in your network statistics, which are only estimates (read further for proof), I believe the number of second degree connections that are shown in the search results above are actual numbers. Unfortunately, your 3rd degree connections are lumped in with “Everyone Else,” so we can’t use this method to divine the size of our 3rd degree networks.

LinkedIn Network Statistics Don’t Add Up

If you can’t use the LinkedIn Network Statistics link due to network size (or if LinkedIn kills the link), you can still use your first and second degree connection numbers from the LinkedIn search method shown above to roughly calculate your third degree network, or at least what LinkedIn might estimate to be the size of your 3rd degree network.

For example, LinkedIn claims my total network size is 30,995,402 professionals.

If I take 30,995,402 and subtract my 10,842,992 2nd degree connections as well as my ~30,000 1st degree connections, I get about 20,122,410.

Here’s the issue – that seems artificially low, doesn’t it?

This takes me back to my original post about LinkedIn’s estimates for 3rd degree networks that references a very interesting exchange on getsatisfaction.com in which a LinkedIn rep mentions that the numbers shown in network statistics are estimates based on an algorithm and are “purely used for display purposes.”

That leads me to believe that the figure displayed as the number of professionals that LinkedIn claims my 1st degree network links me to (30,995,402+) is only an estimate, and I happen to think it’s much lower than the real number.

Even with significant network connection overlap, I don’t see how 10,800,000 2nd degree connections can yield a total network of only 31,000,000 people.

Am I missing something here?

Any math/statistics gurus out there care to weigh in?

I really would like to hear from anyone who has insight into what a more realistic 2nd degree to 3rd degree ratio would be.

Bonus LinkedIn Network Content

While some of you no doubt know about LinkedIn’s InMaps, I am quite sure many people don’t. As such, I thought I would share that you can get a very cool visualization of your LinkedIn network by going here: http://inmaps.linkedinlabs.com/

Unless, of course, you have a large LinkedIn network, in which case, you will only see this:

100+ Free Sourcing & Recruiting Tools, Guides, and Resources

5 Replies

It’s been a LONG time coming, but I finally got around to updating my free sourcing & recruiting tools, guides and resources page where I now keep a current list of the best of my work all in one place for easy bookmarking and reference.

You can find it here on my main page:

Additionally, I thought I might as well put all of my best work all in one blog post as well – over 110 of my articles in one place for easy referencing!

My blog is a pursuit of passion and not of profit – if you’ve ever found anything I’ve written helpful to you, all I ask is that you tweet this out, share it on LinkedIn, like it on Facebook, or give this a +1 on Google.

Many thanks for your readership and support – please pay it forward to someone who can benefit.

Big Data, Analytics and Moneyball Recruiting

Big Data, Data Science and Moneyball Recruiting

The Moneyball Recruiting Opportunity: Analytics and Big Data

Human Capital Data is Sexy – and Sourcing is the Sexiest job in HR/Recruiting!

Is Sourcing Dead? No! Here’s the Future of Sourcing

The End of Sourcing 1.0 and the Evolution of Sourcing 2.0

How to Find Email Addresses

How to Use Gmail and Rapportive to Find Almost Anyone’s Email Address

Social Discovery

2 Very Cool and Free Social Discovery Tools: Falcon and TalentBin

Talent Communities

The Often Overlooked Problem with Talent Communities

Lean / Just-In-Time Recruiting / Talent Pipelines

What is Lean, Just-In-Time Recruiting?

Lean Recruiting & Just-In-Time Talent Acquisition Part 1

Lean Recruiting & Just-In-Time Talent Acquisition Part 2

Lean Recruiting & Just-In-Time Talent Acquisition Part 3

Lean Recruiting & Just-In-Time Talent Acquisition Part 4

The Passive Candidate Pipeline Problem

Semantic Search

What is Semantic Search and How Can it Be Used for Sourcing and Recruiting?

Sourcing and Search: Man vs. Machine/Artificial Intelligence – My SourceCon Keynote

Why Sourcers Won’t Be Replaced By Watson/Machine Learning Algorithms Any Time Soon

Diversity Sourcing

How to Perform Diversity Sourcing on LinkedIn – Including Specific Boolean Search Strings

How to Use Facebook’s Graph Search for Diversity Sourcing

Social Recruiting

How to Find People to Recruit on Twitter using Followerwonk & Google + Bing X-Ray Search

Google Plus Search Guide: How to Search and Find People on Google Plus

Facebook’s Graph Search Makes it Ridiculously Easy to Find Anyone

How to Effectively Source Talent on Social Networks – It Requires Non-Standard Search Terms!

How a Recruiter Made 3 Hires on Twitter in Six Weeks!

Twitter 101 for Sourcers and Recruiters

Anti-Social Recruiting

How Social Recruiting has NOT Changed Recruiting

Social Recruiting – Beyond the Hype

What Social Recruiting is NOT

Sourcing Social Media Requires Outside the Box Thinking

Social Networking Sites vs. Job Boards

LinkedIn Sourcing and Recruiting

Sourcing and Searching LinkedIn: Beyond the Basics – SourceCon Dallas 2012

LinkedIn’s Dark Matter – Profiles You Cannot Find

How to Get a Higher LinkedIn InMail Response Rate

The Most Effective Way to X-Ray Search LinkedIn

LinkedIn Catfish: Fake Profiles, Real People, or Just Fake Photos?

LinkedIn Search: Drive it Like you Stole It – 8 Minute Video of My LinkedIn Presentation in Toronto

How to Search LinkedIn and Control Years of Experience

How to Quickly and Effectively Grow Your LinkedIn Network

How to View the Full Profiles of our 3rd Degree Connections on LinkedIn for Free

How to Find and Identify Active Job Seekers on LinkedIn

LinkedIn Profile Search Engine Optimization

Free LinkedIn Profile Optimization and Job Seeker Advice

Do Recruiters Ruin LinkedIn?

The 50 Largest LinkedIn Groups

How to See Full Names of 3rd Degree LinkedIn Connections for Free

How I Search LinkedIn to Find People

LinkedIn’s Undocumented Search Operator

Does LinkedIn Offer Recruiters any Competitive Advantage?

Have You Analyzed the Value of Your LinkedIn Network?

Where Do YOU Rank In LinkedIn Search Results?

What is the Total Number of LinkedIn Members?

Beware When Searching LinkedIn By Company Name

LinkedIn Sourcing Challenge

How to Search for Top Students and GPA’s on LinkedIn

What’s the Best Way to Search LinkedIn for People in Specific Industries?

18 LinkedIn Apps, Tools and Resources

LinkedIn Search: What it Could be and Should be

How to Search Across Multiple Countries on LinkedIn

Private and Out of Network Search Results on LinkedIn

How to “Unlock” and view “Private” LinkedIn Profiles

Searching LinkedIn for Free – The Differences Between Internal and X-Ray Searching

Sourcing and Boolean Search

Basic Boolean Search Operators and Query Modifiers Explained

How to Find Resumes On the Internet with Google

Challenging Google Resume Search Assumptions

Don’t be a Sourcing Snob

The Top 15 Talent Sourcing Mistakes

Why Boolean Search is Such a Big Deal in Recruiting

How to Become a World Class Sourcer

Enough with the Exotic Sourcing Already – What’s Practical and What Works

Sourcing is So Much More than Tips, Tricks, Hacks, and Google

How to Find, Hire, Train, and Build a Sourcing Team – SourceCon 2013

How to Use Excel to Automatically Build Boolean Search Strings

The Current and Future State of Sourcing

Why So Many People Stink at Searching

Is your ATS a Black Hole or a Diamond Mine?

How to Find Bilingual Professionals with Boolean Search Strings

How to Best Use Resume Search Aggregators

How to Convert Quotation Marks in Microsoft Word for Boolean Search

Boolean Search, Referral Recruiting and Source of Hire

The Critical Factors Behind Sourcing ROI

What is a “Boolean Black Belt?”

Beyond Basic Boolean Search: Proximity and Weighting

Why Sourcing is Superior to Posting Jobs for Talent

The Future of Sourcing and Talent Identification

Sourcing is an Investigative and Iterative Process

Beyond Boolean Search: Human Capital Information Retrieval

Do you Speak Boolean?

Is Recruiting Top Talent Really Your Company’s Top Priority?

Sourcing is NOT an Entry Level Function

Boolean Search Beyond Google

The Internet Has Free Resumes. So What?

How to Search Spoke, Zoominfo and Jigsaw for Free

Job Boards vs. Social Networking Sites

What to Do if Google Thinks You’re Not Human: the Captcha

What if you only had One Source to Find Candidates?

Passive Recruiting is a Myth – It Doesn’t Exist

Sourcing: Separate Role or Integrated Function?

The #1 Mistake in Corporate Recruiting

How I Learned What I Know About Sourcing

Resumes Are Like Wine – They Get Better with Age!

Why Do So Many ATS Vendors Offer Such Poor Search Functionality?

Do Candidates Really Want a Relationship with their recruiter?

Recruiting: Art or Science?

What to Consider When Creating or Selecting Effective Sourcing Training – SourceCon NYC

The Sourcer’s Fallacy

Sourcing Challenge – Monster vs. Google – Round 1

Sourcing Challenge – Monster vs. Google – Round 2

Do You Have the Proper Perspective in Recruiting?

Are You a Clueless Recruiter?

Job Boards and Candidate Quality – Challenging Popular Assumptions

When it Comes to Sourcing – All Sources Are Not Created Equal

Boolean Search String Experiments

Boolean Search String Experiment #1

Boolean Search String Experiment #1 Follow Up

Boolean Search String Experiment #2

LinkedIn’s Voltron Search: What’s New and What’s Missing

8 Replies

In case you haven’t heard, LinkedIn is rolling out a new search interface globally over the next few weeks.

If you’d like to read the official statements and press-friendly content about LinkedIn’s new search functionality, you can find read about the changes on LinkedIn’s blog, TechCrunch, Search Engine Land, Mashable, and PCMag.com. If you’re only going to read one – read TechCrunch’s – it’s the best of the bunch in my opinion.

However, if you’d like to know what a LinkedIn power user and sourcing/information retrieval geek thinks about LinkedIn’s new search functionality, you’ve come to the right place.

I’ve had access to LinkedIn’s new search interface and functionality for a week now, and I wanted to share with you my first impressions, discoveries, disappointments, concerns, and suggestions for LinkedIn.

LinkedIn Search: New, but Improved?

LinkedIn’s Smart Query Intent Algorithm

Before I had access to the new LinkedIn search, I was excited when I first read about the concept of a “smarter query intent algorithm.” LinkedIn claims that the more you search for content on LinkedIn, the more the query intent algorithm “learns and understands your intent over time to provide the most relevant results.”

Of course, I’ve only had access to LinkedIn’s new search for about a week now, so I can’t tell how “smart” is has become based on the queries I’ve been feeding it. However, the issue I have with any query intent algorithm that claims to be able to provide me with more relevant results is that only the user can determine if results are “relevant” or not.

According to Merriam Webster, relevance is defined as “the ability (as of an information retrieval system) to retrieve material that satisfies the needs of the user.”

As such, by definition, only the user can truly determine or judge relevance. A search engine cannot ever truly “know” the needs of the user.

While I appreciate and applaud the intent behind an “intelligent query algorithm,” which isn’t dissimilar to what many have been trying to do for years when it comes to search, the best way to implement such a system is to incorporate a feedback loop for the user to tell the algorithm which results the user truly finds relevant, rather than relying on supervised or unsupervised machine learning or some other method based on which profiles are clicked vs. which ones are not, and/or perhaps time spent reviewing specific profiles.

I’d love to know exactly how LinkedIn’s smarter query intent algorithm works (I’d love to make it smarter!), but something tells me that’s not something they would disclose.

I’m not a fan of black box search algorithms – I like to know exactly why I get the results I do.

LinkedIn’s Suggested Searches

I was also excited when I read about suggested searches, because my mind immediately raced to thoughts of LinkedIn being able to suggest better queries or perhaps searches other people had run for similar terms/people.

However, what LinkedIn is really referring to with regard to “suggested searches” is related to new unified search functionality in that if you type in a term or a title into the main search box on LinkedIn, you will see a list of options you can choose from, such as searching for related jobs, people, connections, groups, and skills.

I’m not saying this isn’t cool functionality, it’s just that I have high expectations when someone makes a claim of “suggested searches.”

Customized LinkedIn Results

According to LinkedIn Product Manager Johnathan Podemsky, “No two professionals are alike on LinkedIn. This means even if you search for the same thing as someone else, your results will be customized to you,” “LinkedIn’s search efforts are founded on the ability to take into account who you are, who you know, and what your network is doing to help you find what you’re looking for.”

This makes total sense based on the LinkedIn’s underlying fundamental concepts, but from a recruiting perspective – what if the best candidates aren’t within the network of the person conducting the search?

While Stephanie Mlot from PCMag claims LinkedIn’s changes put “…LinkedIn on a more level playing field with Facebook, which introduced Graph Search earlier this year as a way for users to sift through the network’s 1 trillion connections for more details about their friends,” I don’t agree. One major distinction is that a user can search for and find anyone using Graph Search – regardless of whether or not they are connected to them in any way.

Of course, LinkedIn does offer a solution for people who want the ability to search for anyone regardless of network connection – it’s called LinkedIn Recruiter.

However, if you’re searching LinkedIn for free, you’ll notice you no longer have the ability to sort all of the results of a search, which leads me to what’s missing from LinkedIn’s new search interface and functionality.

LinkedIn Signal

While LinkedIn Signal isn’t new – what IS new is that you no longer have to go to “News” on the top nav bar and click “Signal” – you can now simply click “Updates” on LinkedIn’s new search interface to instantly be taken to a Signal search for the keywords you’ve already entered.

Signal is one of LinkedIn’s most powerful and underutilized features. With the new and more prominent placement, I hope Signal will get the use and appreciation that it deserves.

What’s Missing from LinkedIn’s New Search

Curious to know what’s NOT included in LinkedIn’s new search interface and functionality?

A number of things.

Results Sorting

First and foremost, you can no longer sort your search results.

I always searched by keyword relevance when searching LinkedIn, because even with a large network, I am not so ignorant as to believe that the best people for any given position I may be sourcing and recruiting for are always going to be within my 1st or 2nd degree network, let alone my 3rd degree connections or within my LinkedIn network at all. If the best match to a search happens to be in my 3rd degree network, I’d like to see them come up on page 1 of the results.

Say goodbye to this if you’re using a free LinkedIn account:

LinkedIn’s sort by “relevance” option was a mix of network connection and keyword relevance. Based on my searches using LinkedIn’s new search interface, it seems that search results are sorted based on some combination of keyword relevance and relationship, as 1st and 2nd degree connections are returned early in search results and 3rd degree and group only search results come much later in ranking.

While you can still search specific layers of your LinkedIn network, there is no way to search for Group-only connections that are not also connected to you in the 1st, 2nd, or 3rd degree.

With a free account, the only way you can try and achieve anything close to searching solely by keyword relevance is an X-Ray search. Thankfully, you can still sort your results by keyword relevance within LinkedIn Recruiter.

The Ability to Run SUPER LONG Boolean Search Strings

I am sad to report that LinkedIn’s once-epic ability to run Boolean search strings of over 3,000 characters has come to an end.

That means you can no longer perform some of the interesting diversity sourcing searches I’ve detailed in the past, such as searching for all of the HBCU’s in a single search, or searching for the 354 most common female names in the U.S. over the past 4 decades to find 65% of all of the women on LinkedIn in a single search.

From my preliminary testing, it seems that you can get away with searches up to around 1,300 characters with spaces before you start to encounter LinkedIn just spinning and never executing your search. With a first name search, this is what 1,281 characters with spaces looks like.

Top 10 Facets

Also missing from the LinkedIn’s new search interface is the ability to see the top 10 results in each facet.

I can’t be the only person who found the ability to see the top 10 companies employing certain types of people in a given market, the top 10 markets for specific skills, or the top universities by skill to be valuable, can I?

Now free users are limited to the top 5.

Thankfully, you can still view the top 10 results in each facet in LinkedIn Recruiter.

Advanced Search Operators

Alas, Voltron has laid LinkedIn’s Advanced Search Operators to rest.

What? You didn’t know LinkedIn had Advanced Search Operators?

They may have been LinkedIn’s best kept secret for years, and you could do a number of interesting things with them, such as creating search agents.

Are you wondering why I referenced Voltron?

Take a look at the URL when you run a search in the main search box when using LinkedIn’s new search functionality: Voltron Federated Search

I’m assuming Voltron is the code name for LinkedIn’s new search and that “vsearch” also stands for Voltron Search.

Anyone care to (neither) confirm (n)or deny?

Mobile

Ingrid Lunden from TechCrunch called out the fact that mobile is missing from this LinkedIn search upgrade.

LinkedIn has claimed that extending new search functionality to their mobile apps is something that they’re looking into, but for now, the mobile apps only allow users to search people but not within other categories.

Mobile search is a big deal for LinkedIn – did you now that 19 people searches are performed and 41 profiles are viewed every second via LinkedIn mobile apps?

http://youtu.be/eO8nmRDKv2I?t=1m50s

What About 3rd Degree Connections?

While there was a bit of early buzz that users searching LinkedIn with a free account would not be able to search 3rd degree connections, you can in fact still search for them.

While some early testing showed that it appears LinkedIn’s default was to only return results from your 1st and 2nd degree network, all of my recent searches appear to default to “All,” which includes Group Members and “3rd + Everyone Else.”

Search Anomalies

Thankfully, I haven’t run across too many search anomalies yet, but I did find a few I think you (and the LinkedIn dev team) will find interesting.

I ran a basic search and took notice of the top 5 companies represented:

I then set about to see if I could use the -/NOT functionality to eliminate results from the top 5 companies in order to find the next top 5 (thus completing the top 10).

I started entering 1 company at a time in the current company field: -Microsoft, -IBM, -Cisco, etc.

This seemed to work quite well in removing those companies from the top 5, allowing me to explore the next 5 or more. But then I noticed that when I was excluding the company names in the current company field, the company names were being returned as positive hits and highlighted as keywords in the profiles. The same thing happens if I change it to -(ibm OR microsoft OR cisco).

Hmm. That’s not good.

The same thing happens when I try to exclude a term from the title field. As you can see below, I am excluding the term “engineer” from the title field, and while the term is excluded properly in most cases, there are a few random results where “engineer” is in the current title – as with Kevin below, the word “engineer” also shows up as a positive & highlighted keyword hit in summaries, headline phrases, etc. It doesn’t matter if I use NOT, AND NOT either – I’ve tried all 3 ways and get the same results.

This one is pretty strange – I ran a first name search for “Abigail” and got results with “Gail” and “Abby” on the first page.

I don’t know how much of a fluke this is, because I’ve tried other names as well as searched for companies and various I.T. keywords to see if LinkedIn is performing some kind of fuzzy matching but have yet to run into another instance where LinkedIn gives me terms other than the one I specifically searched for. Please let me know if you find any.

Also, it seems that the ability to search within groups from the main search interface is still being listed as a premium filter with the yellow “in” icon, yet I can search within groups with my free account. Maybe it’s actually free functionality now?

What I Would Like to See from LinkedIn Search

For quite some time I’ve been thinking about writing a post specifically about what I’d like to see from LinkedIn with regard to new search functionality, but I’ve never gotten around to it.

I’ll take this opportunity to at least highlight a few things I would suggest to the LinkedIn team:

The ability to specifically search within the most recent work experience listed. One word: Massive. Can I get an “amen?”
Stemming/root word/wildcard search. It would certainly be nice to not always have to construct massive OR statements, e.g., (develop OR developing OR develops OR development OR developed OR developer).
Not only bring back the top 10 in each facet – but enable them to be expanded to the top 25. Expanded facets yield incredible market and competitive intel/insight with the click of a mouse.
Ability to sort by keyword relevance not tied to relationship. If you can’t/won’t bring this back to LinkedIn for free accounts, at the very least, never get rid of the ability to sort by keyword only relevance in premium versions.
Keyword boosting – enabling users with the ability to determine which keywords are the most relevant to them.
Proximity search – enabling users to search for terms within a specific distance of each other, to achieve semantic search.

If you weren’t already aware, LinkedIn used Lucene for text retrieval, and Lucene is capable of wildcard search, variable term boosting, and variable proximity matching.

I wrote a post nearly 4 years ago titled LinkedIn Search: What it COULD and SHOULD Be – I suggest you take a look and also read the comments, because one of LinkedIn’s principle software engineers working on LinkedIn’s search engine at the time weighed in with some very insightful comments here and here.

What would YOU like to see added to LinkedIn’s search functionality?