The Opposite Bug in LIR

booleanstrings Boolean, LIR 8 Comments

 

Two days after I published an astonishing discovery on the space ” ” providing extra results, LinkedIn Recruiter quietly changed its search algorithm – again! (Big thanks to several colleagues who tried the searches, no longer saw the same results as I had posted, and alerted me). Could be, LinkedIn fixed the LinkedIn Recruiter problem? After the change, both examples in the post “Spaced Out!” returned the same number of results.

Unfortunately, it is too early to celebrate. The new algorithm has brought in new bugs. Let’s look at one of them. In this example, an “object” search, i.e. a selection of a standard job title produces many more results than “Boolean”, i.e. plain keyword search. Compared to the way it was a few days ago, we can call it “the Opposite Bug”.

If you would like to reproduce this, search for: current title = Tax Specialist (selection or keywords), location = Greater New York Area, industry=Financial Services, and keywords=”corporate tax”.

If you think that the “object selection” type of search now does better because it produces more results, try to look at the results closer. Apparently now LIR includes what it considers to be synonyms to the standardized job titles. But they are not synonyms, are they? Here are just three examples of the job titles included what LinkedIn thinks are synonyms to “Tax Specialist”:

1) Senior Program Manager, Film Tax Credit Program; 2) Finance Intern – Tax; 3) VP Tax Reporting.

Not impressive.

Once again, searching by selecting a standard job title, by selection, produces the wrong results.

Conclusion: the algorithm has changed, but Boolean still wins. Don’t forget to end your searches with a space ” ” as a shortcut to “communicating” Boolean to Recruiter.

 

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  1. Love the hard time you give LI and keep them honest. I’m surprised they haven’t bought you out yet and made you advisor or something so you go easy on them!

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