LinkedIn.com People Search Anti-Improvements

[Edited] Phew! They have fixed it. It might have happened due to me filing an issue – once my message was communicated to Developers, the behavior went away in a few hours. Interacting with @LinkedInHelp is not for the faint of heart – they asked me whether I know about Boolean search and sent me to read the help article, said that “if many users require the change, we will consider it” (they tweeted it but then deleted the tweet), and the infamous “have you cleaned your cookies?”. It took a couple of dozen messages before they sent it to the development team. Oh well.

LinkedIn.com people search just got more unintuitive and inconvenient. Last week, Jan Bernhart shared on our Facebook group that when you put keywords in the Title field, LinkedIn will find past titles as well.

Here are the changes:

1) Put keywords in the Title, find titles past and present.

For example, you search for Title=developer and find VPs who used to be Developers a long time ago. (How is this helpful?)

This search will find people who have been developers, managers, and VPs in some positions, past or present.

Both past and present is a significant loss since we need to search for current titles. The way around is excluding the wrong titles, but it is cumbersome:

developer NOT manager NOT director NOT vp

2) Put a company name in the Company field – find companies past and present.

People who have worked at Amazon, Google, and Microsoft.

If you select a company, it will search for the current. Compare Amazon selected and in the Company field.

However, searching for a selected company finds fewer results than in the Company field (if it searched for the current company). Also, we can no longer search for the current company, including the word “bank,” for example.

It is a loss.

3) Entering a job title in the keywords, will find the same as searching by Title (i.e., titles past and present). Even a search for a skill like Java results only in searching in job titles. So does a search for the keyword “certified.”

Which keywords will LinkedIn interpret as keywords, and which as job titles? We have no idea.

So, X-Ray has become more important. We can search for present titles and companies since they are in the profile page titles. X-Ray will ignore past “unclosed” positions as well.