Investigating the LinkedIn X-Ray Story

Guest post from 大卫厨房 .

Returning to the office this week, I found the recruitment community abuzz about news that the ability to X-Ray LinkedIn for member profiles was dying (hat tip to Marcel van der Meer). Big news for those who rely on Google to perform searches over LinkedIn’s data that the platform itself does not provide, and potentially, for people aggregators, whose databases are largely built around a core of data collected from LinkedIn by one means or another. If you aren’t a member of either group, that’s a shame because anyone relying on LinkedIn to make a living should make an effort to learn both its limitations and their workarounds.

Having investigated the situation more thoroughly, here is a list of X-Ray search options we may be losing:

That’s more than half of what we could search before, and for most recruiters, all of the most useful fields. ?? To make things worse, we have even lost the ability to perform searches that were only possible on Google.

How many profiles are currently affected and whether this represents a permanent or temporary change remains unclear. LinkedIn regularly performs split testing across its platform to assess the efficacy of potential improvements. That is, the LinkedIn you see today may not be the LinkedIn I see today and may not be the LinkedIn either of us see tomorrow.

The best test I could think of was to look at public directories to see if they could shed some light:

It turns out that redacted profiles are displayed differently than unredacted profiles everywhere, and using this fact, I could perform some not-quite-scientific sampling (hand counting the number of redacted vs unredacted profiles on a few directory pages).

Marcel van der Meer’s the world over fares well - only 7 of 38 shown are redacted! However, John Smith may be in trouble (15 of the 48 shown are redacted). I only had the patience to do this a few times, but the range in my limited testing was ~20-40%.

So, where does this leave us? For now, we can continue to include X-Ray searching in our sourcing practice: get the data while the getting is good!

However, to prepare for a post-X-Ray world, it will be important to beef up your LinkedIn search skills.

PS: You can brush up on your Booleans, learn the undocumented LinkedIn search operators, and more by joining me at LinkedIn 2024 Solved class.

Explore solutions to the most common challenges recruiters face in getting the most from LinkedIn.