From LinkedIn Engineering: “Don’t confuse skills with “that list of skills you entered on your LinkedIn profile”.  We intuit skills from MANY places.  For example, we will give you “credit” for a skill if you: -Have it in your profile some place.  We convert all the text in your whole profile in to one big field behind the scenes and use it to keyword search for skills.  -Have it in a resume we have access to (this is permission dependent).  We scan resumes for skills.  -We also “give credit” for skills based on connections at times. (!!)  So, let’s say you ..read more

Guest post from Ashfaq Ahmed. Continuing from my previous post – Death of LinkedIn X-Ray, What next? Before talking about Bigdata concepts, let me demystify a common sourcing myth that is widely prevalent in the industry: “There is no one approach to sourcing. Everyone can have their own strategies/approaches.” If you’d be interested in why such a thought process is prevalent in the industry, read my linkedin post (to keep this blog short, I’ll jump onto Bigdata concepts). Bigdata concept is nothing but a structured approach to organizing your data sets and addressing them as small & ..read more

Guest post from Ashfaq Ahmed. I got on a call with Irina & David & we discussed how sourcing will be impacted in the Post- X-Ray era. First things first, why were we able to access LinkedIn via Xray before? Because when you’ve logged out from LinkedIn and visited a profile via Google, the profile data was more or less similar to what you saw when logged in. Now, LinkedIn didn’t want scrapers or even Recruiters to access their data from search engines, and thereby, they changed the UI of Public Profiles by hiding almost all crucial data. Sourcing Tools : This change will not affect Lar ..read more

The Google advanced search dialog still shows file types: But search using the operator filetype: and keywords no longer works. For example, filetype:xlsx attendees returns all sorts of pages. For now, you can use a workaround: filetype: will still work if your search contains either site: or inurl: operator. We can use them with the minus, essentially excluding nothing, like this: -site:zzz filetype:xlsx attendees -inurl:zzz filetype:xlsx attendees We all wonder how long Google will support its operators (I will need to update the operator list). [edited] Danny Sullivan says it ..read more

LinkedIn X-Ray is gone (or soon to be gone, depending on your location). So, what did LinkedIn do? The screenshot above shows my LinkedIn public profile settings. For the majority of members I know, the settings are the same. We want to be found on Google and Bing, which the UX promises. However, this is my experience and education on the public profile. Profiles all went to “extreme privacy” starting about a month ago. Most data went to the deep web, which search engines cannot access. 1. Members were never informed of the changes – or asked whether we wanted them. 2. LinkedIn Help still sa ..read more

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 ..read more

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 comparabl ..read more

I have “Saved As” my public LinkedIn profile, and it looks like this: This is my “Experience” and “Education.” Nothing much is visible without logging in. A large percentage of profiles look the same. But things are in flux on the web. Google LinkedIn X-Ray is back! Mike Santoro has noticed. We think it is temporary. In his post, Marcel has a screenshot of this search, pulling words from my now-hidden public LinkedIn profile: site:linkedin.com/in social list elsevier sourcing training verge brain gain. Here is Marcel’s image;  Google could not find me two weeks ago. Here is today’s scree ..read more

Guest post from Julia Tverskaya. Are you a Technical Recruiter? Are you looking for Software Developers? On January 16th, Irina announced a new GitHub search and export tool in her LinkedIn article.  We are happy to report that the tool has immediately attracted hundreds of users and we hope many more will discover its value. The GitHub User Search tool empowers sourcers to find, export, and contact GitHub users. Our email search is optimized to be as precise as possible. You can find and export up to 1,000 results in each run. At this time, we do not require a login. There is nothing co ..read more

My friend Marcel van der Meer’s message shocked me this morning. He was the first to notice a huge reduction in LinkedIn public profiles. The Headline, About section, Experience, and Education are gone. There are still some public profiles with the full data, but it’s a matter of time before all will be reduced. LinkedIn has notified Google, so there is no old indexed data for us to X-Ray. Why did LinkedIn do that? Not because some of us use LinkedIn X-Ray for sourcing. The obvious reason is harming LinkedIn’s competitors, people aggregators like SeekOut that provide a superior search over Li ..read more