Yesterday LinkedIn hosted a webinar titled Ask the Experts about LinkedIn Recruiter (LIR) featuring Sankar Venkatraman, Global Product Evangelist & Daniel Scanlan, Customer Education Consultant. They talked about some of the upcoming product upgrades and enhancements, however, the part I was most excited about (and paid closest attention to) were some new filters coming soon to advanced search within LinkedIn Recruiter.
The three features coming in the near future are a skills filter, a “profiles viewed” filter, and the ability to filter based on languages. The feature I think will be most useful for people is the ability to filter profiles based on the skills section. The new features will be introduced on a rolling basis. With regards to the skills filter, I checked and I already have access to the feature. The filter can be seen once you start a new search.
The skills search will be an interesting new way of finding individuals or perhaps uncovering some people you didn’t find previously. You may also be able to discover search terms that you hadn’t thought about previously. A quick note of caution, there will be some individuals who have a term in their profile that isn’t listed in the “skills” section and vice versa. With that in mind, for any skill you select, I would also try searching for it as a keyword.
Another new filter, coming in the fourth quarter of this year, is a “Profiles Viewed” filter. This filter will allow you to eliminate profiles you’ve viewed in the past 3 months, (probably 6 months, 1 year, etc.). This is an extremely valuable method to stop seeing the same profiles over and over.
In a previous blog post, I mentioned how to remove profiles from a search that had already been added to a project folder. This is a similar way to accomplish the same thing.
The third upgrade – which will come in the first quarter of 2016 – is a language filter which allows you to filter based on languages spoken as well as proficiency. This is a much needed filter. However, I think LinkedIn needs to do a campaign to attempt to get users to provide this information. From my own personal experience, it seems like very few people have shared this information.
Did you listen to the webinar? What are your thoughts?