My friend Marcel van der Meer’s message shocked me this morning. He was the first to notice a huge reduction in LinkedIn public profiles. The Headline, About section, Experience, and Education are gone. There are still some public profiles with the full data, but it’s a matter of time before all will be reduced. LinkedIn has notified Google, so there is no old indexed data for us to X-Ray.
Why did LinkedIn do that? Not because some of us use LinkedIn X-Ray for sourcing. The obvious reason is harming LinkedIn’s competitors, people aggregators like SeekOut that provide a superior search over LinkedIn’s data. If a tool depends on using public data, its LinkedIn-copied information is now becoming obsolete by the minute.
The good news is that tools like PhantomBuster and my favorite SalesQL will continue to work for now because they interact with the data from your login.
LinkedIn X-Ray is not completely dead; you can still do things with the inanchor: operator. But with so much data hidden, it is not a tool of choice for most tasks.
Some things will now never be found. LinkedIn does not index grades at school, and public profiles have lost them. I would have a huge problem running a (past) sourcing request for CS grads with good grades in Europe.
With that in mind, our focus is now on utilizing LinkedIn’s not-so-great search. To find the fullest data on profiles, you must have the Recruiter, Recruiter Lite, or Sales Navigator subscription.
Join us at the brand-new class
LinkedIn Sourcing in the Post-X-Ray Era
on February 28-29 and figure out how to source in the new circumstances.
Comments 1
Interesting