Have You Retrained Your Team on LinkedIn Recruiter?

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The new LinkedIn Recruiter (LIR) has some interesting and useful features. Unfortunately, it also offers unique search syntax that is hard to remember or understand.

Here’s an example. Guess which job title search will provide more results:

  1. Software Engineer
  2. Software Engineer NOT Senior

If you said “1.”, you are wrong – it’s the 2nd search that will return more results, and here’s why. When we type (just) Software Engineer, LIR automatically assumes that we are searching for a phrase Software Engineer.” But if we use AND, OR, or NOT, it doesn’t assume so. Therefore, the first search will not return (for example) Software Development Engineers, while the second search – would. The search syntax is not intuitive and not consistent with the syntax used in personal and business accounts – and is also not consistent with what it used to be in Recruiter.

The above is probably the most confusing part of the new design; I have described it in a recent post – Beware of the “Smart” LinkedIn Recruiter Search Syntax Change.

Interestingly, the new LIR has kept the “true” Boolean in the keywords search (and also in the only available documentation). If you want to stay with the “normal” Boolean syntax in LIR, there is another opportunity to do that: within “Filters” in Projects, the syntax remained as it used to be. But using a project’s filters is not a very powerful way to search because the profile previews are short.

By now, unsurprisingly, we have heard from multiple recruiters that the search results are not what they expect them to be in LIR.

Additionally, the feature I liked, the toggle between a search dialog and the Search Insights is gone. The “Search Insights” is still there (though it’s now hard to find), but there’s no easy way to switch between the two views.

The new LIR has also lost the valuable display of the distribution of the search results along the facets, such as the current or past company, location, and more. I.e., if you enter some qualifications and want to know which companies employ your target potential candidates, this is no longer possible in LIR.

There’s a lot more your team needs to be aware of if you are LIR subscribers. Join me  – and many of your colleagues – tomorrow at the webinar “Mastering LinkedIn Recruiter” where we’ll go over all the necessary skills, knowledge, and productivity tips (many of which are not part of the help documentation) that you need to navigate the Recruiter.

(If you miss the webinar – no worries – the recording, slides, and support will be available on our SourcingCertification site).

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