Last week, Google has adjusted its index. It no longer finds me and many others by the Headline, About, Experience, and Education.
Bing is in the process. It already does not find some profiles:
Any search engine is affected. (A search engine does not have a LinkedIn login, right? Even if Microsoft owns them both.) X-Ray has lost its power. If it “works” for you, it is only a matter of days, maybe a few weeks before it stops. And it will no longer find updated info on profiles, i.e., your results get outdated daily.
X-Ray going down is a new challenge to respond to!
Nobody has data comparable to LinkedIn. Many would love this not to be the case, but such is life. Because a Premium account does only partial indexing, in order to source within, you need to have LinkedIn Recruiter, Lite, or Sales Navigator and learn how they search. It is not straightforward and is poorly documented. Learn how to search on LinkedIn in our comprehensive class.
You can also X-Ray the shallow data and go from there.
A productive way to source is to come to LinkedIn with some data collected to cross-reference. It can be emails, names, and other things you find outside of LinkedIn. While names are not unique, running a long OR of names combined with what you know about your target profiles, such as industry keywords or companies, can narrow it down to your prospects.
If you are after Software Developers, try our GitHub User Search Tool – no login required. (But please make sure you read the Help!) Once you have the data, go to LinkedIn to cross-reference.
How do you assess continued access to the full profile data if you are using a search engine or an outside system? Here is what I recommend. To (collectively) test how well systems deprived of LinkedIn profile public data will perform:
1) Change YOUR LinkedIn headline
2) Set up alerts on search engines and systems to check whether and when they will catch up, i.e., search for yourself with the new headline in keywords.
Let us know what happens 😉
Join us at the brand-new class
LinkedIn Sourcing in the Post-X-Ray Era
on February 28-29 and figure out how to source in the new circumstances.
Comments 2
Thank you for staying on top on this! On a separate note, in your conversations with people from LinkedIn, has anyone ever mentioned that LI will remove the mass InMail feature? Mass InMails are not the correct way to recruit. They hurt LI’s brand and are a black mark on the recruiting industry.
Author
Not that I heard of. LI brand is hard to hurt because there is no competition.