I’ve just had a conversation with a recruiter who has noticed a strange thing happening with LinkedIn. I’ll explain the situation and see what you think (I’ve changed a few of the details just in case!).
She posted a job on the site for a Director of Mobile Strategy. She duly went through the response but when LinkedIn offered her the option of paying extra to “unlock matching profiles” she declined. A few days later she did a search on LinkedIn to back up the ad response… and lo and behold she could not find ANYONE in a strategy role within a mobile organisation. She is confident that she got better results when searching before she posted the advert.
Is it possible that LinkedIn are excluding those “matching profiles” from her searches?
Has anyone else noticed anything like this? Is she being paranoid or is a known issue with LinkedIn?
Feedback greatly appreciated!
This does seem very odd so I asked a contact at LinkedIn to read this article and he was 100% certain that LinkedIn is not hiding previously visible results.
I must admit that it didn’t seem like the sort of thing they would do either (or that would be possible to do).
As to an explanation for the different results – that is a bit of a mystery but without seeing the exact criteria used for each search at the time it is impossible to assess.
Mark
Thanks very much for looking into this.
I wonder if it’s just a strange co-incidence. I’m going to investigate further.. when she returns from her summer hols!!
In the meantime it would be interesting to see if anyone else has noticed anything similar.
We have recently taken the LinkedIn recruiter account, what we have found is the search results through this are not as good as the search results through using a Talenfinder account. Talenfinder also seems to have better funtionality than the recruiter account. We also posted a job to see what kind of response we would, it has not been great, maybe it is the August effect! In future I do believe we will go back to direct sourcing. Just some food for thought…
I posted a job in June which should have been attractive to many LinkedIn memebers. Got 116 views and NIL responses.
Hmmm sounds very strange and more than a coincidence but it would be a bit of a cynical move on LinkedIn’s part if that were true.
Linkeding is becoming more and more about money!! maybe soon we won’t be able to visit their site without paying!
It is more likely a bug than a feature. LinkedIn ramped up the development of the new features in the last 6 months – and results are visible on the site. All this Job Seekers products are the result and the long list of new features ( I like the new skills section especially). So bugs should not surprise anyone really.
I cant’t believe LinkedIn would do something as unethical as this, it must be a coincidence/ mistake.