One of the few paid Sourcing tools I use is RPS (LinkedIn Recruiter, or LIR, for Agencies). It is our highest yearly expense, but we have been choosing to stay with it for a number of years now. My favorite feature of LIR has always been “Talent Pipeline” (the name doesn’t really fit), which is, in fact, the import function. As you import Excel files into LIR, the records are matched to LinkedIn profiles, and, as import finishes, you can search across the combined info. It’s a powerful Sourcing technique and has been my frequent go-to when Sourcing. The import function has also been quite reliable.
With the just-released new UI, we still have the import function, but LinkedIn has cut off its features to the point where its usefulness sounds like a question mark to me. Import appears to be a much weaker function in the new version.
Here is a brief summary of the changes.
There is no longer a way to match imported fields with LinkedIn’s.
The file to import (it seems) must be CSV-formatted with exactly these columns:
- First name
- Last name
- E-mail address
- Phone number
We used to be able to have one column with first/last, giving us some flexibility. But what is worse, I don’t see a way to import any additional values (that used to go to Notes – and we could then search by them!) Import crashes if a column is added to the import file.
(Before the changes, I was thinking that import would become even more powerful if we could match imported columns with custom fields. Forget about that now!)
And what’s worst of all – at least in my experiments, LIR can import only so many records at once. I was able to import a file with 119 records, but anything over ~140 failed with an error message.
We used to be able to import up to 5K records at a time. Is this a bug? Unless this is fixed (or we find a workaround 😉 ), the Recruiter import feature, a.k.a. Talent Pipeline will have much less value for Sourcers.
Let’s stay optimistic and hope that we will get the full functionality back.
Don’t miss our Productivity Tools for Sourcing webinar on Wednesday, September 11th! We’ll be talking about today’s best tools for all aspects of your Sourcing life. (Most tools covered are free).