LinkedIn® continues to change, evolve and add (or take away) features on a regular basis. Recently, the search capabilities within LinkedIn’s basic level of membership were changed quite a bit. The good news is, you can still use search operators directly from the search bar to narrow your results.
Prior to the recent redesign, you could use Boolean search parameters to produce a more targeted list of results. Well, you still can do this to some extent because they’ve added a set of five search operators that help you narrow down your search results directly from the new search box:
- firstname: Finds members based on first name
- lastname: Finds members based on 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.
Here’s an example: to search for current marketing managers not named Smith, who have attended either Purdue University or Stanford University, try:
title:”marketing manager” NOT lastname:smith school:(purdue OR stanford)
When using search operators, remember to use quotes for multi-word search terms (“marketing manager”), and parentheses for AND, OR and NOT phrases.
A few additional search tips:
- Commas should not be included in between multiple search operators.
- Spaces should not be included in between the search operator and the search term, such as lastname:doe.
Remember, unlike standard search engines, LinkedIn searches generate relevance scores uniquely for each member. Meaning, even though a query will return the same results for everyone, the order is determined in part by the profile, activity, and connections of the person searching.
Let’s say you want to search and add an alert for a job function, university or company:
- Type a job function or company into the main search box (now near the upper-left). You can select from the suggestions in the drop-down list or;
- Hit enter to go to the search results page where you can narrow down your search results by clicking the Jobs search filter and using the filter options on the right-hand side, such as location, company.
- If you want to set up a search alert for example for a specific job title or company you can do so. Once you’ve put in your search, click on Create search alert, and set up to receive via email or text when new job openings are listed.
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