LinkedIn people search would work better if everyone had:
- one degree with the dates
- one current job with a start date.
But so many members have more than one degree. Let us see how it affects the search.
- The education dates and schools/majors are not connected. If you search – in Recruiter or an alumni school page – for a date range and a school, you will find people who have been students there but got another degree within the specified years.
- Searching by education dates also finds people with no dates.
For that reason, you will not be able to find exactly people who got, say, a Master’s in Computer Science within 2017-2021.
You cannot find people with a completed degree either. If you search for a Bachelor’s with the grad dates in the past, you will find current undergrads who have listed a high school on the profile.
Similarly, you cannot find people who majored in a given subject at a given school.
However, searching for a graduation date in the future in LinkedIn Recruiter reliably finds current students. My problem is that I am looking for students with good grades, and LinkedIn Recruiter misses most.
X-Ray helps, but X-Raying for current students is not easy. Most students work part-time, and the profile titles reflect jobs, not the study – though searching for “junior” or “intern” in the page titles helps – as well as “student,” of course.
I have been using future years in X-Ray because the keywords 2023, 2024, etc. are likely graduation dates (though not just). Example:
site:pl.linkedin.com/in “GPA * *” “computer science” 2023 student.
But finding people who will graduate in 2022 is problematic since many people have started working in 2022, so using this year as a keyword is a weak method.
This –
site:linkedin.com/in “computer science” “expected to graduate in 2022”
gets perfect results, but too few of them.
It has been quite an adventure!
When a search is hard to master, scraping can solve it. If you scrape results, you can go with wide-open searches (on either Google or Recruiter) and filter results further in Excel. I believe that scraping has become a must-have skill for anyone who sources.
There is no perfect tool for the X-Ray for my “education” case since I need to scrape “under” the links, i.e., go to each profile in the search results and copy the Education section. (We used to have Ally from include.io, and I miss it dearly every day.) It should be doable with Data Miner, but I am not a fan of the UI. Those of you who write scripts are at an advantage!