Networking's New Rule: Pay for Premium Access

The public profile feature on LinkedIn is now diminishing, and it's no longer SEO-optimized.

This means if someone searches for "oncology, sales, Portland," and you're an oncology rep in Portland, you're less likely to show up in the Google search results (and potentially even LinkedIn).

So, What exactly is happening?

The visibility of information on profiles is decreasing- unless you're willing to pay. Specifically, details like career and education history — which are the main reasons we use LinkedIn — will become less accessible.

Let me give you an example:

First, I completely logged out of LinkedIn, cleared the cache and cookies on my web browser, and then searched my name specifically on Linkedin (site:linkedin.com/in).

Great! I came up first in the results.

Now, let's try a keyword search (pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, recruitment, oncology) and see what comes up...

Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Not even on the first page of Google.

What's interesting is that legacy profiles seem to come up first.

How do I know?

I clicked on one of the profiles that appeared first and it showed work history. This profile hasn't been transitioned to the "new" public profile (you can see work history).

For comparison- here is what comes up on my profile (the newer profile of LinkedIn). Everyone will soon (TBD) be transitioned over to a profile that is blurred out.

Nada, nothing, zilch. Ouch.

What can we infer from this? LinkedIn is gradually phasing out legacy profiles and it's safe to say the "new" profiles are no longer SEO-optimized.

Think about all the recruiters, sourcers, and salespeople who rely entirely on X-ray (Google) for candidate sourcing. This move by LinkedIn seems like a push towards their paid version. Not cool.

How much should LinkedIn cost? We pay $4,000 per recruiter seat, which is absurd.

I expect this cost will increase given the recent decline in legacy profiles, making it nearly impossible to source from the free version.

When worknig with a new recruitment agency: Make sure to ask how they source candidates, where they source from, and how long it takes, as most agencies rely solely on LinkedIn, which is not ideal nor sustainable. Relying soley on job postings/linkedin will not yield top tier talent.

Sourcing from LinkedIn is becoming increasingly limited. At Cascadia Search Group, we've conducted A/B testing between two LinkedIn Recruiter profiles running identical searches. My profile, with nearly 15k connections, yields vastly different results compared to a colleague with about 4k connections. When you're paying $4,000 for any software, the results should be consistent.

Will these changes hinder or help LinkedIn in the long term? Only time will tell.