YOE in LinkedIn Recruiter Demystified

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For years, I have been annoyed at the “years at company” , “years in position”, and “years of experience” filters in LinkedIn Recruiter. I get false positives like many other. For example, I search for people with more than one year of experience and see those who have only worked for eight months. I have filed it in the (long) “known bugs” category. (Filing bugs with LinkedIn has never proven fruitful for me.)

And then it dawned on me what it is doing. It is not a bug, it’s a feature! It is an undocumented feature. LinkedIn is rounding the number of months! (This way, someone’s 7 months at a company is rounded to 1 year, and the person wrongly appears in the results. It “works” the other way around, too. Someone with 2 years 5 months at a company or in a position will be found in a search for people with less than 2 years of the same. The “years of experience” has the same flaw (though it is also buggy in other ways).

(If I had a requirement to search by the rounded years of experience, it would be right on! I would have said, “thank you, LinkedIn”! But I do not recall being asked to do so.)

How does it happen that “the” site (LinkedIn) and “the” type of account (Recruiter) most corporations use has such a fundamental misunderstanding of what Recruiters need? My best guess is that at LinkedIn, Developers end up inventing what the user wants. Communicating users’ needs to Developers is the role of Product Managers. It must be the PMs do not know about recruiting, or they do not talk to the Developers. It is hard to say.

And we waste time opening non-matching profiles.

Learn about other ways LIR “really” works in LinkedIn Recruiter Mastery.

At least understanding what’s going on makes it less annoying. The radical way to deal with such inconveniences is scraping. After you have scraped the data, you are in control of finding and filtering by the correct values, and not their interpretations,

If you have not done scraping data as part of your sourcing process, it is time to start.

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  1. Pingback: Search Is Broken on LinkedIn – NOT, AND | Boolean Strings

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