I’m a big fan of LinkedIn. I was one of their first members – number 58,795 out of more than 275 million members – and for years I’ve paid a monthly fee for a higher level of service. I’m in LinkedIn all day every day. But there’s a major problem with its search, and it amazes me that after 10 years it still work this way.
Currently this is a “feature”, not a bug — although IMHO it acts like one. This is how LinkedIn search is currently configured to work, and it really reduces its value for finding the people you want to find, and properly targeting advertising. Here’s how I described the problem to LinkedIn support:
When doing searches for people or targeting advertising I run into a persistent problem with LinkedIn search: that it combines attributes across all of a person’s current positions. Let’s say, for example, that I want to target owner/partner/C-level people of 500-1,000 person companies in my area. I put that in, but what I am returned are people in those positions as well as people who are individual consultants (and are an “owner” or “president” etc. of their small/one-person consultancy) but also work in a 500-1,000 person company at a lower level. I don’t want those latter people in my search results, and they make up a considerable part of the people returned in many cases.
Obviously someone who’s searching for C-level people in mid-size organizations is not looking for owners of small and individual consultancies; if I did want them, I’d search for owners of 1-10 person companies. But that’s who LinkedIn includes.
LinkedIn support quickly replied with this:
Thanks for reaching out to us regarding your search results. Our searches are programmed to review the entire profile of a member for the keywords and attributes that you have requested in your search terms. Unfortunately, there isn’t a way to specify they are Owner/Partner of a specific level of company.
I’ve sent your concerns on to our product team for consideration. When many of our members ask for the same improvement, they try their best to get it done. However, due to the number of suggestions they receive, they usually don’t provide a timeline.
So if you, like me, would like a more intelligent, useful LinkedIn search feature, for ad hoc searches and advertising, we need to make our voices heard. Here are two ways to do that:
- I’m going to tweet a link to this article to the founder of LinkedIn, Reid Hoffman @reidhoffman , and to LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner @jeffweiner – you could tweet to them, too. They might have some influence on matters of this nature.
- Contact LinkedIn support by logging in and going to http://help.linkedin.com/app/ask — you can then post a support issue about this (you’re welcome to use most of my language from above) or use the online chat feature on the right to register your request.
And please pass this on to other people. The more people they hear from the more likely they are to take swift corrective action.
Thank you!
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