LinkedIn Boolean Is Crazy

booleanstrings Boolean 8 Comments

Searching on LinkedIn costs many Recruiters low self-esteem. When you see results you did not expect, you may blame yourself for searching “the wrong way.” But it is rarely the case.

What has been happening on LinkedIn and LinkedIn Recruiter (LIR) lately is beyond my (reasonably high) IQ.

Let us compare some searches on LinkedIn.com and in LIR. We vaguely anticipate that Recruiter should produce more results because it is expensive. But which ones? We still see “LinkedIn Member” instead of the names for profiles that are out-of-network on LinkedIn; so what exactly is hidden? (In the past the results’ numbers were the same, and only the visibility was different.)

Examples confirming that LIR is “better”:

  • AWS – 1.3M+ results on LinkedIn.com and 3M+ in LIR.
  • vp marketing (NOT sales) railroads – 10 on LinkedIn.com, 407 in LIR.
  • cats dogs – produces  3.6K on LinkedIn and a whooping 100K+ in LIR. No pay, no cats, no dogs! Who are the mysterious cats and dogs people only found for money? I have no idea.

But sometimes, it is the other way around:

  • janitor – 211K on LinkedIn, only 110K+ in LIR.
  • cats NOT dogs – 210K on LinkedIn.com, only 150K+ in LIR.

The discrepancy is all over the place. I doubt it is LinkedIn’s conscious effort to get more dollars out of its customers.

Have LinkedIn Developers activated a random number generator while celebrating something? Or are their servers under attack?

In the meantime, try our tool Social List (cc upfront, 7-day trial, $50/month after) to generate excel exports of LinkedIn and other Social Network X-Ray results; it also has a Contact Finder. The tool will not be affected by any LinkedIn bugs, I promise.

 

 

 

Comments 8

  1. I’m getting very different levels to you Irina, particularly on the free account numbers you’ve been experiencing. Cats Dogs search, for example, is returning 101K on both Free and Business Premium for me, and 99K on Sales Nav (I don’t have Recruiter any more). All very weird, certainly!

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  2. Yes I’ve seen different search results too with different accounts (free or professional).

    I get the same numbers as you, Irina. My colleague with a much smaller network on LinkedIn (700 versus 15K) gets more results for each search ‍♂️

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  3. Pingback: Notes from the LinkedIn Field | Boolean Strings

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