A few days ago, many functions on LinkedIn broke for several hours (you can always – and hopefully will be able to – check on Twitter whether something is going on globally). LinkedIn mostly got it back together to the previous state. This post is about what remains broken. A lot, unfortunately – I don’t think it has been that bad before.
I do not know of workarounds for some of these problems. Whether you use a business account or LinkedIn Recruiter, incorporate X-Ray into your sourcing. Google’s search is reliable. And back up your data.
Broken Functions
- LinkedIn.com people search has been broken for almost a year. Members are not found by some keywords in headlines, summaries, and job descriptions, seemingly randomly. Curious Mike Santoro has discovered that adding the minus to the end of your string surfaces some more results. (What??) But it is not a cure for every case.
- LinkedIn people search removes your quotes in fields like Job Title, resulting in false positives.
- The connection search is broken.
- Job search is broken.
- The syntax for Recruiter’s Skills box is unclear; it is not Boolean, it is not an AND of terms.
The Strange Numbers in LinkedIn Recruiter
[update: fixed, as a result of this post!!!]- As of today, LinkedIn Recruiter shows 1.4B+ total members, a jump from the recent 1B+ and unexplained discrepancy with LinkedIn.com, which comes up with under 900M.
- LinkedIn Recruiter finds 620M+ people without locations, a jump from 84K+. Some of them do have locations, though, and shouldn’t be found.
- On the other hand, searching for these locations gives us 25 members – I think there should be more:
- LinkedIn Recruiter finds 1B+ people without years of experience. I have no idea how this happens. Two weeks ago it found 600M+.
- Both LinkedIn and Recruiter will incorrectly miss 910M+ (i.e., 65%) profiles if you search by Industry.
The above is not a complete list of misbehaving functions; I could go on. The broken filter functions and strange numbers in Recruiter are new.
It is a shame since we, as well as job seekers and clients, are affected by the site’s health.
I have made multiple attempts to report problems to Customer Support. It has not made a difference. I am hoping to find another channel of communication. [Edited: since posting, I have heard from two managers at LinkedIn and am hopeful.]
This post is to bring some awareness to the state of things. If you see something unexpected on LinkedIn, it is likely not you (and please share what you observe).
X-Ray, I say!
Comments 5
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Many people have asked me about contacting #LinkedIn Support regarding the latest issues (see my blog for a summary). I hate to sound negative, but…
I have had multiple reps reply to my LinkedIn error reports. Each new person asks to tell the story from start – like “I am told you have an issue, what is that?” It takes several days to assure them I have cleaned my cookies, have the latest browser, and they can log in as me – which they do not need for a global issue. Then, they either deny something is wrong – and tell me I do not understand Boolean, see the screenshot – or “send the issue to another technical team.” The request then dies with that “other” team. The error report is considered processed. They send me a survey to assess their support.
LinkedIn support never tries to reproduce an issue – they ask for a report and screenshots from the user.
Also, there is no way to report a global problem – they only attend to your account (it is a general support issue for many sites though).
This is disgraceful. I’m not a fan of lawsuits in general, but LI Recruiter is not cheap, and the forever problems with search results seem like they are intentional or the result of gross incompetence. Maybe a class action suit would get their attention. Something needs to.
Things have been so crazy on LI the past several weeks. Some people lost all their connections, but then they reappeared (thankfully this did not happen to me.) This morning one of our sponsored jobs lost its Apply button for an hour or so, then it reappeared. Sometimes I’ll see a profile that appears and then disappears and then reappears. Thanks for the tips! Glad to see that I’m not losing my mind!
Under ‘Contact Info’ LI used to let you know when you connected with an individual. It is no longer there. It’s important because it often give me a point of context if I knew when and how long.
You can add this to your list.
This is what happens when there really is no competition in a market. If they had any real competition things like these would get fixed but as things stand no other platform is even close.