The premium LinkedIn subscriptions – Sales Navigator, Recruiter Lite, and LinkedIn Recruiter vary in the search filters provided for people search. It’s worth noting though, that only one type of account – Sales Navigator – also provides advanced company search, unavailable elsewhere. Personal accounts currently only offer keyword company search, while Lite and Recruiter don’t provide company search at all. Why is that so? It’s hard to say.
Take a look at the screenshot of the company search in Sales Navigator. It has a number of useful filters.
The filters Keywords, Geography, Industry, and Headcount/headcount growth, Relationship, and Job Opportunities are straightforward and defined by LinkedIn’s data. The other filters – Department headcount, Annual revenue, and Technologies used – are somewhat mysterious, with no explanation provided.
Our best guess is that “Department” correlates with the “Job function” that LinkedIn automatically assigns to profiles. Searching for people by “Job Functions”, also called “Areas of Expertise”, is available in Lite and Recruiter and looks like this:
“Job function” is not a user-entered value; LinkedIn determines it based on user’s profiles.
We think that the numbers of people in Departments likely correlate with their job functions. There is a bit of a problem with that, since one profile can have multiple Job functions assigned (I have tested that). So some people may be counted as belonging to more than one Department.
Where does LinkedIn get the info about the Revenue and Technologies used? Could it be that the latter takes the data from member’s skills? We don’t know.
Clearly, this company search is useful for anyone looking for new business – including Recruiting Agencies.
Please join me for the webinar “How to Find Clients and Vacancies for Your Recruiting Agency” on Wednesday, April 18th, for an exploration of a wide variety of Business Development research for Agencies.