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!