Bye bye LinkedIn X-Ray
Using Google to search LinkedIn profiles is coming to an end
While it's not official as of today January 19, 2024, several experts have noticed that LinkedIn profiles are disappearing from Google searches. Credits to Marcel van der Meer and Irina Shamaeva for this! 🕵🏻
Thus, several Recruiters and Sourcers who heavily rely on X-Ray search methods, may soon lose their data sources 😲
Likewise, tools and browser extensions relying on old technology and the ones using SERP pages and X-Ray search results will no longer function as expected 😨
From LinkedIn's public pages, much information is no longer visible as it has been until now.
The list of fields that are not visible and not searchable with an X-Ray search are the following:
- Current Job Title
- Summary (About)
- Headline
- Work experience (Job descriptions)
- Job location (current and past)
- Years at a company
- Past Companies
- Past Job Title(s)
- School(s)
- Field of study
- Degree and school grades
Fortunately , technology offers alternatives, and tools are already available that won't be affected. One of these is Jobin.cloud which uses X-Ray simply as a convenient free add-on to a number of other sourcing services.
With Jobin.cloud it is possible to identify candidates from several sources, import what is available and mass enrich profiles including contact information such as emails (work+personal) and phone.
As soon as the full profile is automatically imported into your Jobin.cloud repository you are able to perform
advanced searches that include details written in previous job experiences,
years in current role, total years of experience, skills, languages, and certificates, including searches on your additional tagging, messages sent,
and even things such as your LinkedIn connection level.
Want to delve deeper? See this video for more insights: "Advanced Filtering and Ranking - AI powered Automation System"
The filtering possibility offered by Jobin.cloud include Boolean strings as well as AI powered semantic search capabilities to automatically build and extend filters.
But, returning to our main topic.
Worth noting is that this may simply be a temporary experiment that LinkedIn is carrying out... Only time will tell 👀 - It's not the first time LinkedIn makes radical changes and then reverts them shortly after. (I'm writing this on January 19, 2024)
Why is this happening?
The cause is LinkedIn blocking search engine crawlers from indexing people's profiles on LinkedIn. Even those that were previously defined as 'public' profiles do not leave the confines of LinkedIn.
In other words, they're no longer actually "public" profiles: you need a LinkedIn account to see them, this means you'll likely need a LinkedIn premium membership to perform better searches and if those contacts aren't within your LinkedIn network you'll be forced to pay for a LinkedIn Recruiter license or higher to even see them.
Is this a business move on LinkedIn's part?
Is it a broader operation orchestrated by Microsoft (which owns LinkedIn and the Bing search engine) to limit what Google and other search engines can do?
We can't know for sure, and can only speculate.
However using the same keyword, today Google gives 13M results, whereas Bing gives 23M …
…the speculation goes further
It could be designed to impede tools that extract/rely on Google's SERP and LinkedIn URL links to provide recruiters and alike with profiles while bypassing LinkedIn's limitations and pay-walls.
Still a speculation, but in line with LinkedIn's regular behavior of forcing the use of its own platform to access profiles, despite making them inaccessible if outside of your LinkedIn network - even though LinkedIn is not the owner of those profiles. To back this, we can confirm that LinkedIn has progressively limited profile views, limited the number of messages that can be sent and limited the possible connection requests allowed, and locked broader means of outreach behind a paywall (inMails) 😏
What's the outcome of these LinkedIn changes?
Recruiters who use X-Ray on search engines, Google in particular, are in trouble
Recruiters relying on this data source will notice poorer and outdated results.
Likewise, a vast majority of sourcing tools and some contact finder tools that relied on the same.
This will very likely impact the business of Recruiting Agencies and HR departments.
But, fortunately not all of them!
How can this be resolved?
Of course, there are alternatives and solutions to these changes.
Let's explore several ways we can approach this problem:
- Pay for LinkedIn🙄 ... and one of its higher subscriptions if you need search capabilities for recruiting.
Unfortunately, the prices are also rising.
This is the solution that LinkedIn wants you to follow.
This is good assuming the search capabilities and AI technology you find in LinkedIn are sufficient for you.
But unfortunately LinkedIn leaves much to be desired Find out more here... and here and here -
Again, play the Microsoft game, and use Bing as your search engine to apply your X-Ray searches.
It's possible that LinkedIn (owned by Microsoft) is only limiting other search engines (like Google) in an effort to popularize Bing (owned by Microsoft), and in fact, it appears that as it stands now, Bing is providing more LinkedIn profiles in its search results compared to Google searches (see above).
(Some tools like Jobin.cloud can easily automate X-Ray searches for you on either Google or Bing switching between them with just a button) -
The most radical and definitive solution is to change the source😎
Fortunately the profiles of potential candidates aren't exclusively found within LinkedIn, there are powerful data aggregators from which Sourcers and Recruiters can extract relevant profiles that fit very detailed filtering criteria and often use advanced Boolean strings and operators. There are some examples of data aggregation tools that are well established on the market and popular in the recruitment industry.
Like SeekOut, HireEZ and Jobin.cloud
For more details on tools of this category you can read: this
