How to Search by City Location on LinkedIn

booleanstrings Boolean, LinkedIn 7 Comments

The worst part of LinkedIn.com people search is that we no longer can search by any location other than a standardized one, like “San Francisco Bay Area” (where I live). But my area is large; people won’t commute from San Jose to San Francisco, for example.

The workaround for narrowing down to a “city” location, like “San Jose, California,” is to search in keywords. Interestingly, though on some profiles you will see only a generic area name, the profiles will be found if you put a location name in the quotation marks into Keywords. (Not quite WYSYWIG!)

I recently chatted with Henk van Ess who pointed out that if he searched just by a city name, he would get profiles in this area, in his example, “Apples.” I think I knew about this but have looked into it deeper this time.

Here you go:

  1. LinkedIn.com will find profiles in a search by a city location name. To avoid false positives, you need to enter the full LinkedIn location name in quotes. The location names are the ones you can see in Recruiter, but you can often guess.
  2. (Good for us!) LinkedIn.com does not search within work locations. So we won’t have too many false positives.

Here is an example from our discussion with Henk:

“Apples, Vaud, Switzerland.”

It produces a little over 70 profiles, all of which do reside in the area, though many won’t have it visible on their profiles:

Enjoy! 🙂

We have lots of other tips in our recording “Overcoming LinkedIn Limitations.”

Comments 7

  1. I saw Henks’ post but always doing a double-check with you is great! Is there a place where we can prep the lists of LIR locations?

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  2. That’s interesting. When I then select the “Continue search in Recruiter” link it returns 0 profiles. Any idea why?

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