LinkedIn has made quite a few changes to its platform in the first quarter of 2017 and has been rolling out its new design gradually since the middle of January. Most of the changes are cosmetic but the changes to LinkedIn’s search facility is the big one. In this article we look at the new LinkedIn search changes and how they affect users.
You may have already noticed that the Advanced Search option no longer exists on LinkedIn. This means that you can no longer filter your search by keyword, first name, last name, title and location. What you can do is filter by level of connection (first, second, or third), general locations (countries and towns but not postcode), companies, industries, profile language, non-profit, language and schools. In addition, saved searches and tagging are no longer available for free. For advanced searches, saved searches and tagging, you have to upgrade to LinkedIn’s premium option or Sales Navigator.
LinkedIn Search Changes for People
To do a more detailed search for a specific person, you type their name into the search box at the top of the page and either select from the suggestions in the dropdown bar or press enter to take you to the search results page. Clicking the People filter at the top will bring up the people results only. From there you can narrow your search by using the filter options described above on the right-hand side.
LinkedIn Search Changes for Job Function or Company
To search for a job function or company, type it into the search box at the top of the page. As above, either select from the dropdown list or press enter to go to the search results page and narrow your search by clicking the Jobs search filter and use the filter options on the right hand side, such as location or company. You can also set up a search alert for a specific job title or company by clicking on Create search alert. You can choose to receive your job alerts by email or text.
Search Operators
You can also narrow your search results by using search operators. There are five of these, as follows, which can be combined with the boolean operators AND, OR and NOT.
- firstname: – Finds members based on first name
- lastname: – Finds members based on last name
- title: – Finds members based on their current job title
- company: – Finds members based on their current company (keyword search)
- school: – Finds members based on schools attended (keyword search)
LinkedIn announced at the end of February that it is going to reintroduce some of the old search features over time. These include text fields for keyword searches, saved searches and sticky filters (when the filters you select remain in place for future searches). You can now also search for posts using the search box too.
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