For the past few months, LinkedIn has been undergoing an extreme makeover. Originally announced through their blog, many LinkedIn users have seen these changes roll out on their desktop. These changes have been disappointing to many recruiters and sourcers alike, though some have shown their support. Frustrating to most users was the removal of many premium search features, the ability to use Boolean commands, and the slow speed at which it takes to view a user’s LinkedIn profile, just to name a few.
Coordinating with their makeover, LinkedIn does appear to be listening to its user’s concerns. Yesterday, LinkedIn announced further adjustments to their new desktop redesign. You can check out the latest announcement below directly from the LinkedIn blog.
What’s New?
Notifications: Now you can customize the types of notifications you receive based on what you find the most valuable, for example, birthdays, work anniversaries, job changes and more.
Photo Filters: LinkedIn introduced a simple way to crop and enhance your profile picture.
Trending Storylines in your LinkedIn Feed: With daily curated interest-based feeds you can quickly discover the most important developing stories in your industry. Check it out on your mobile home screen under the Trending tab, or on the desktop, it’s at the top right of the homepage.
- Search fields: LinkedIn added back search tools to help you more quickly find the information you need, including Saved Searches, Boolean and text field search (such as first name, last name, company, and school).
- Profile Completion Meter: You can now discover what you need to do to strengthen your profile, and attract more opportunity.
- Manage Comments: LinkedIn added the ability for you to directly manage the comments you have on your long form articles, with the option to disable or enable comments.
Boolean Search
For the power search (a term reminiscent to most AIRS Alumni) members out there, LinkedIn added a set of five search operators to help you narrow down your search results directly from the search box:
- firstname: Finds members based on the first name
- lastname: Finds members based on the last name
- title: Finds members based on their current title
- company: Finds members based on their current company (keyword search)
- school: Finds members based on schools attended (keyword search)
Search operators complement the filters on the right-hand side of the results page and the AND, OR and NOT boolean operators.
What’s to Come
LinkedIn has hinted that there are many more changes to come. For sourcers, there are many improvements that we would like to see. For starters, Boolean search can still improve. Though I find their new commands do work well (major props on fixing the NOT issue), there are more commands that sourcers would like to see (lastjob:, skills:, radius:, workanniversary:, yearsofexperience:).
Additionally, I believe everyone, including LinkedIn, would like to see the unprofessionalism abolished. If Facebook can teach us how to spot fake news, LinkedIn can show us how to recognize a bogus profile, or at least help us better remove the unprofessionalism we often see on the homepage.
For now, we can have some solace knowing that LinkedIn is listening to our feedback (fingers crossed). What changes on LinkedIn would you like to see?