Adventure Continues (Five New Undocumented Operators)

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Adventure continues! By now, I have discovered five more undocumented LinkedIn search operators in addition to those covered in my recent posts Two Undocumented LinkedIn Search Operators and Three More Operators!

So here are some other values you thought you couldn’t search for with a free or premium LinkedIn account – but in fact, you can! Let me introduce the additional operators.

1) Operator profilelanguage: searches for the profile languages and can be helpful for expat and diversity searches, along with spokenlanguage:, covered earlier. The values need to be two-letter language abbreviations. Example:

profilelanguage:fr

looks for members who have a profile in French.

2) yoe: is the operator to search for years of experience. Example:

yoe:3

looks for members with 3 years of experience. Note that, with the years of experience, LinkedIn gets quite “uncertain” and assigns multiple values to some profiles like these: yoe:”1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8″.

3-4) Operators startyear: and endyear: search for years in school. Example:

endyear:2017

looks for members who graduated in 2017;

endyear:2020

looks for members who will graduate in 2020.

5) Operator geo: searches for locations, but in an unexpected way. It doesn’t take any geo-codes as parameters (not these codes at all). Nor does it work with postal codes. Instead, it searches within the text of Geonames, which can be found at http://www.geonames.org/postalcode-search.html, as well as within LinkedIn standard area names for members who chose to display them.

For example,

geo:”berkeley california”

searches for all people who live in Berkeley, CA,

geo:”berkeley california bay area”

searches for people who live in Berkeley, CA and are displaying “San Francisco Bay Area” as the location on their profiles, while

geo:”berkeley california” NOT geo:”bay area”

finds those who live in Berkeley and display “Berkeley” as their location too.

So – congratulations, you can now search by a location name for any postal code, which in practice means that you can search for any city and state. Compared to selecting from the standard location names (such as “San Francisco Bay Area”) provided in the advanced search dialog, this gives you much better precision. (I know Bay Area Recruiters will appreciate this for sure).

So here are ten hidden LinkedIn search operators that you can now use with a free or premium account:

  1. headline:
  2. skills:
  3. industry:
  4. seniority:
  5. spokenlanguage:
  6. profilelanguage:
  7. yoe:
  8. startyear:
  9. endyear:
  10. geo:

That is not much less and, in some ways, better than what LinkedIn Recruiter provides!

Like what you read? Check out our new eBook “Sourcing Hacks”, coming out shortly, available for pre-order here. It is full of “hacks” like these undocumented operators and will help your sourcing productivity for sure!

 

 

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