LinkedIn Does Not Understand Its Data (and a Conference May 31 – June 3)

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When your requisition asks for a Bachelor’s degree, do you use the Degree filter in LinkedIn Recruiter? I used to but have now stopped. When you search for Bachelor’s, LinkedIn misses profiles like this:

Here is what happens: LinkedIn has allowed members to enter their data in a relatively “free-form” format, but it fails to interpret the data correctly. It results in “false negatives” in search results: many matching profiles do not appear.

It is the same story with other filters. For example, LinkedIn cannot assign Seniority, Function, or Company Size to almost half of its members.

How do you find profiles in this hidden, uninterpreted data?

With filters like Company or Job Title, where you have a choice of text (Boolean) or selection, use Boolean most of the time. Value selections will only find profiles that LinkedIn “understands.”

With filters like Degree or Seniority – do not use them, at least not in some of your searches.

Please join me and several other speakers (whose names you will recognize) at

Global HR & Recruitment Forum,

where my talk will be:

“How LinkedIn Recruiter (Really) Works.” LinkedIn has the best professional data. However, finding the right profiles with LinkedIn Recruiter (or Lite) is not straightforward. The UI/UX is highly unintuitive, and users who follow the prompts miss a lot of potential matches. Irina will explain the algorithms behind the LIR search and hacks to get deeper into sourcing, unearthing candidates that LIR has not made easy to find. She will also explain why stepping outside of Recruiter and using LinkedIn.com and X-Ray widens your search.

70% of the registration fees will go to help Ukraine, which is a great reason to join and hear first-class content on sourcing and recruiting!

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