Recruiting

LinkedIn added an upgraded "profile organizer" tool only available to premium members.

Read more about it on LinkedIn's Blog and on its description page.

Is anyone using it?

The consensus is that this feature alone is not worth the premium price of an account upgrade but LinkedIn may start to enhance these premium features in order to grow its base of paying members.

Would this feature encourage you to "go premium"?

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings releases his company's take on a values & culture "manual" which leaves nothing up to the imagination.

Details include their "rockstars only" hiring policy, a policy of no vacation policy, and guidelines and methodology behind a culture of of autonomy, responsibility and effectiveness.

Love to see more companies trash the corporate BS mission statements and get real.

Hastings, you are my new hero!

As LinkedIn grows upwards of 40M+ users, spanning 150+ industries and representing every country in the world, recruiting and sales professionals outside of the US continue to find value in searching for business contact names.

Considering all of the Search enhancements LinkedIn has released over the past few quarters, it's a surprise to see how hokey the Advanced People Search is when trying to search for contacts based in or near any non-US cities.

For the US-based recruiter who needs to place the occasional candidate based outside the US, it isn't terribly difficult to memorize a token postal code to put into the Postal Code field.

However, this process can get old rather quickly if you are not based in the US, and require city/regional focus to source contact names.

Recently, LinkedIn rolled out new features as part of its Advanced People Search. This TechCrunch article explains the change was brought on to get people to stick around the site longer, and pointed out one in three users of the site perform regular searches.

On every search results page, you can now dynamically filter the results with additional criteria. Changes you make by checking off the boxes do not require you to re-run the search -- they appear instantly.

However, only some of the functionality is of any use to sales and recruiting professionals.

Soon after LinkedIn launched in May of 2003, it became apparent the professional networking site would turn into a great resource for B2B salespeople and recruiters.

In 2008, the site launched LinkedIn Recruiter for large enterprises and recruiting firms, yet the advanced search function (the free search tool available to everyone else) has always been watered down in order to appeal to a variety of backgrounds outside of business development and recruiting.

While creating the Peopletoucher Search Engine we took apart the features of LinkedIn's Advanced Search and put them back together piece-by-piece with our audience in mind. Here's what we found:

Using LinkedIn with a basic/free account means once you find a prospective decision maker or job candidate, contacting them must go through a chain of trusted contacts, or not take place via LinkedIn at all.

The time it takes to send a "Get Introduced through a Connection" message can take days (or weeks) considering it is a muti-step process. Many are even hesitant to forward prospecting inquiries to their connections.

Upgrading to a Business Account ($25/month) allows you to contact prospects instantly using LinkedIn InMails -- Here's 3 reasons why they work:

Certain company names are too long to fit in the company field, especially if they were made of multiple words. The company in question was "Agrium Advanced Technologies".

We restricted company length to 25 characters to prevent you from entering unnecessary words -- this search should simply use Agrium.

Unnecessary words like Incorporated, Corp, Company, and Inc., will skew search results because people create profiles with multiple variations of the same company name.

Today's question came in from Mark: "I ran a query using the title of "project manager." Is it possible to use peopletoucher to search both current and previous titles and companies?"

When building the Peopletoucher Search Engine, we decided to make the default behavior current company and current title only, in order to increase the accuracy of the search results, and help promote the best searching behavior.

Here's some probable solutions to your issue and searching best practices.

Recently, I used the 3-degrees of Kevin Bacon analogy to describe how your searching ability is limited to your LinkedIn network, the group of people connected to you via 3 degrees of separation. This is precisely why it is imperative to add connections and grow your network; for every connection you add, your searching ability increases.

Check out your network stats to get an idea how many people are in your network out of the overall LinkedIn population which is currently about 36 Million. If your network is less than half (17M) you have some work to do.

Talking with a friend about the site, she asked why the Peopletoucher Search Engine doesn't have Industry as a search option.

In the days when you actually had to search LinkedIn manually, she used to pick "Non-Profit Management" in the industry field, when searching for accounting job candidates.

While this method might be tempting, it creates a huge problem.

There are many overlapping industries a user can pick.

"Fundraising", "Philanthropy", and "Non-Profit Organization Management" would all fit the bill.

The second reason why industry is dubious: There isn't consensus as to whether industry means your area of expertise, or the primary sector your company operates.

Searching for business contacts on LinkedIn can be thought of as joining two moviestars via Kevin Bacon, center of the entertainment universe. Except with LinkedIn, you are limited to three degrees of separation and not six.

The people within that 3-degree universe (your LinkedIn network) represent the sum total of your direct connections, plus their connections, and so on to three levels. If a contact is outside that your network, you can only see their title on their profile, not their full name.

Let's experiment with the effect each connection you create brings to the size and scope of your network.