The death of X-Ray prompts everyone to study LinkedIn’s search closer.
LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator has different algorithms from both Premium and LinkedIn Recruiter. There is no good reason for that. Different Developer teams fell out of sync.
Sales Navigator “thinks” most of LinkedIn. (I am being sarcastic.) It has a huge population of
1,665M+ profiles.
What are the 665M profiles unaccounted for in other accounts and in press? It is hard to say. In 2022, I posted LinkedIn Software Crisis (a Summary). At that point, LinkedIn Recruiter showed 400M “extra” profiles. It was a bug, that was fixed then due to the post and subsequent connection with an Engineering Director for LIR. Maybe it is the same bug in Sales Navigator, counting uploaded resumes as profiles.
Despite that, I think Sales Navigator is a fine choice for sourcing. It has a nice set of search filters. If it understood the hidden operators, it would be awesome. But it does not.
What I like about Sales Navigator is its search URLs. They are “readable,” can be shared, and expose various internal codes.
For example, I selected every function in the search, and from the URL, got this list of Function codes, which are not officially documented:
Accounting = 1
Administrative = 2
Arts and Design = 3
Business Development = 4
Community and Social Services = 5
Consulting = 6
Education = 7
Engineering = 8
Entrepreneurship = 9
Finance = 10
Healthcare Services = 11
Human Resources = 12
Information Technology = 13
Legal = 14
Marketing = 15
Media and Communication = 16
Military and Protective Services = 17
Operations = 18
Product Management = 19
Program and Project Management = 20
Purchasing = 21
Quality Assurance = 22
Real Estate = 23
Research = 24
Sales = 25
Customer Success and Support = 26
The secret operators do not work in SN, but you can use these codes in Recruiter or Lite with the operator functions:.
As always with LinkedIn-computed data, there is a warning. LinkedIn is not good at interpreting its data. Lots of members do not have functions assigned. Sales Navigator shows 1BN results without functions. It is 2/3 of the profiles. Since it has some ghost profiles, the high number may be the consequence of that. But always make sure that some of your searches do not include calculated values such as function (or seniority, etc.)
LinkedIn, unfortunately, falls behind in these AI times. No matter what account you use, it is best to use Boolean search where possible and understand how selections work.
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