Worldwide, close to 200 million people are using LinkedIn. Most of them have setup a profile and have accepted a fair number of invitations. Some of them are searching for new clients or colleagues but have yet to discover LinkedIn's powerful "Advanced Search." (In the presentations and training sessions we conduct, the number of participants who are aware of this feature is well below 50 percent.)
How you can make the most of your searches and easily find the people you're looking for on LinkedIn? Simple: When you are on your LinkedIn homepage, you will find a search bar at the top, right-hand side. Just to the right of it, you will find the "Advanced" button. This leads you to an advanced search page.
Even the most basic LinkedIn account will give you access to the following fields in "Advanced Search":
- Keywords. Here you can type anything you want. LinkedIn then searches all fields (free text and lists).
- First name and last name. Self-explanatory.
- Location. Anywhere (in the world) or "located near," followed by your country.
- Postal code. You can search in a radius around a specific postal code. This helps to fine-tune the results, if that is helpful for your goal.
- Title. Job function. You can choose to find only people who are currently holding that position, people who once had that position or both (default). Note: This search is based on function, not "Professional Headline" (the description under your picture on your profile). By default, this is your function, but I recommend changing it.
- Company. You can choose to search only people who are currently working for this company, people who worked for the company in the past or both (default). Make sure you are using the correct spelling (PriceWaterhouseCoopers begets different results than PwC).
- School. Self-explanatory.
- Industry. You can search all industries or individual ones.
- Relationship. You can search all LinkedIn members or limit your search to people in your first-, second- and third-degree networks (or beyond) or to people who belong to the same groups as you.
- Language. You can limit your search to people speaking a certain language. However, I don't recommend this option because you might miss a lot of people who haven't implemented this function yet.
As you might get a bit overwhelmed by the number of options, I advise you to start with just one or two fields (e.g., title and location). Have a look at the number of results first. If it is a large number, start fine-tuning by adding more criteria. Tweak it until you have fewer than 100 results. Why? With the free account, you can view only the first 100 search results.
