Welcome to episode 144 and a very happy new year to you all. I hope you achieve great things this year and I trust that LinkedIn will be with you every step of the way!

I thought I would start the year with a focus on searching. As we know, the much loved Advanced search feature will be gone once we all get the new UI so it seems a good time to focus on the subject.

But before that I saw a few things this week that I thought you might find interesting….

The Twitter account you should use to get the attention of LinkedIn’s published post editors has changed! I saw this from John White this week;

Worth knowing about if you publish a lot on LinkedIn.

LinkedIn Censorship

Following on from my rant about LinkedIn censorship in the last episode I was reminded by someone of the infamous Candice Galek and how much her posts get censored by LinkedIn. I have to admit that many of her posts actually do need censoring as they often used to include inappropriate images but it seems she is now getting censored for criticising LinkedIn - not good LinkedIn, that really is Soviet style tactics!

The above post has now been removed by LinkedIn!

Searching in 2017

I saw a very interesting presentation this week from Shakhina Pulatova who is the Search and Discovery Product Lead at LinkedIn, based in San Francisco.

You can watch the full presentation from the Global Big Data Conference in August last year here;

Instant and Personal: Searching Your Network at LinkedIn

This presentation was about how LinkedIn design their instant search feature on the flagship mobile app. It’s especially relevant as the new UI seems to use the same system.

Highlights include; Search results are effected by ‘global popularity’. This must refer to profile views so getting profile views will improve your search ranking. Results are also personalised. Your activities and profile information will have an impact on who finds you. Machine learning. It sounds like this is still a new area for LinkedIn but it’s clear that the algorithm is constantly learning what you want from your actions. We need to consider this when growing through our search results.

Results ranking: She gave us some interesting clues about how a search resulted is ranked with network distance, similarity of network (shared connections) and global popularity appearing to be important. She also referred to ‘spammy content in names and headlines’ counting negatively.

Recruiter Lite vs Sales Navigator

With the impending demise of advanced search in the new desktop design, many users are reluctantly having to consider upgrading from a free or Business level premium account.

So what option do you go for?

Why is this even a question?!!

Surely the clue is in the name - If you use LinkedIn to win new customers then Navigator is the correct solution (it is!) and if your role is to fill job vacancies then Recruiter Lite is the obvious choice (and it also is!).

But what if your role involves both?…..

That is the dilemma facing Recruitment businesses throughout the world and it's more than just a choice between LinkedIn products, it actually addresses a key question about how that business operates!

To help with this dilemma, I wrote a post on LinkedIn covering a comparison between the two;

Sales Navigator VS Recruiter Lite