I have just finished a project sourcing iOS Developers across Europe who got top grades at school. It turns out, LinkedIn Recruiter (LIR) does not search in the grades! I couldn’t search by “first class”, “distinction”, “honours”, 2:1, etc. Reporting the issue resulted in Support predictably asking me whether I cleaned the cookies and use an outdated browser. A Message from our Relationship Manager reads: “I’ve hit a bit of a roadblock with our previous request to get you in front of an engineer, our executive team denied the request.”
Before that, I searched for employees of Non-Profits and encountered FAANG (big tech) current companies.
We cannot stay away from LinkedIn – the largest professional database with self-entered information. Of the ways to search, LinkedIn Recruiter (LIR), albeit unintuitive, has the best set of search filers – 39 of them! However, if you only search within LIR, you are missing results.
LinkedIn Recruiter will not search in:
- Grades
- Accomplishments like Honors and Awards, Certifications, Patents, and Publications
- Employer locations
- Schools by Boolean
- Attached resumes
- Attached sites and Twitter
- Recommendations
- Self-entered skills
- Headlines (like “open to work”)
- Two spoken languages with levels
- Summaries
- Items featured on profiles
- Organization membership
- Unemployed
- Pronouns
- Names with accented characters
- Diversity
- Posted content.
Searching with these filters is buggy:
- Connections
- Years of experience and at company
- Function
- Seniority (for example, it treats Executive Assistant to CEOs at the C-level)
- Company size
- Company type.
Years of study are not tied to schools. Also, there is no way to find members who have completed a degree. Searching by a profile is useless. “Hide previously viewed” is flawed.
I am calling it “Dysfunctional Search.”
People with LIR subscriptions feel that they have the most powerful search – and they are right. But:
- You need to understand its underlying algorithms
- You can accomplish quite a few things by additionally using your personal LinkedIn account and X-Ray.
When you search with LIR, it is critical to understand how it exactly works. As an example, there is a big difference between searching by selections and Boolean (guess which type finds more 😉 ).
If you want to be productive, competitive, and less frustrated, join me for a 90-min presentation on LIR this Thursday – “LinkedIn Recruiter Mastery”. Get control of the powerful tool by searching in Boolean and applying the Hidden Operators; get your subscription money worth. This information is not in Help, and Support does not know about it. I hope to “see” you there!
If you missed the class, you can get a recording at the same link.