LinkedIn Search Made Easy! How To Search On LinkedIn Like A Pro?

LinkedIn Search is the most convenient way to look for your target group or audience on LinkedIn. Using LinkedIn Search, you can search for people by adding different criteria, like a selected industry or a specific position in a company.

LinkedIn search is not just typing the relevant details in the search tab. It's way more than that. For example, to search for a LinkedIn profile, you can use the LinkedIn advanced search, Xray search, etc. You can even do a LinkedIn search by email. However, the problem people face while searching on LinkedIn is that either they are unable to set the required criteria for the target audience, or they are unaware of other methods of LinkedIn search and the restrictions. It is significant to have knowledge about the LinkedIn search to use it effectively.

For this, don’t worry we've got you covered; we will make LinkedIn search way more effective for you.

Let’s dig into it!

Basic LinkedIn Search

Searching for people is the first task that new LinkedIn users mostly do. The most basic way to perform a LinkedIn search is by using the search bar on the LinkedIn home screen. You must just search for the person you are looking for by typing the name in the search box. It's that easy!

But what if you want to search for people from a particular industry or at a specific position?

Well, LinkedIn search has the answer to it; let’s explain it with an example; if you are looking for a marketing manager, then type ‘marketing manager’ in the search box, and you will get to see the results for it; you can click on ‘See All’ to get an expanded list. And can even search for a company or agency using LinkedIn search.

Advanced LinkedIn Search

Advanced search is the most reliable LinkedIn search method offered with LinkedIn Sales Navigator. It provides you with the facility to target your audience precisely. If you go for a general LinkedIn search, you will also get some relevant results, which can be improved using advanced filters by Sales Navigator.

Different types of searches can be performed, such as:

• LinkedIn search by name- You can directly search for a person using their first or Last name.
• Company- Organizations and agencies can also be searched directly, and some posts related to that search will also be available with the company name.
• Location- You can also target people based on their geographical location or company's headquarters, like the USA, Japan, and India. etc
• Industry and function- You can also target prospects based on the industry they are working in and their job function. This is the most beneficial filter for recruiters to find a suitable person like Finance or HR.
• Company size- You can also target prospects based on their company size, whether small, medium, or large.
• Past company- One can also filter out the people working in a particular company previously.

• Company headcount- If you want to search for a company with more than 100 employees or less than 100 employees, you can set a range like 1-100, 100-1000 to filter out the results.
• Seniority Level- People looking to connect with people at a higher or lower level in a company can use keywords like Owner, Chairman, CEO, and Intern to get a list of specific people.
• Years of experience- Seniority level may not be enough for you if you are looking for a person with specific years of experience. You can set the experience as well for an effective LinkedIn search.

You can use more than 20 advanced search filters to get relevant results.

Basic LinkedIn Search vs Advanced LinkedIn Search

What edge do you get if you opt for LinkedIn Sales Navigator and use Advanced LinkedIn search?

• Using Basic LinkedIn search, you can view 1st and 2nd-degree connections only; on the other hand, if you use Advanced LinkedIn search, you can even view 3rd-degree links.
• You can save unlimited searches with Advanced LinkedIn search.
• Advanced LinkedIn search offers a more personalised search because of many filters.
• Advanced LinkedIn search allows you to have approximately unlimited complete profile views, whereas Basic LinkedIn search limits the profile views.
  

LinkedIn Boolean Search

Boolean search is a way of carrying out a LinkedIn X-ray search. Using LinkedIn Boolean search, you can perform a criteria-based search for relevant people and companies. You can use this to further narrow down your results, using certain functions or search operators:

• Quoted Search- This kind of search operates with Straight Quotation (“); it can be used to limit the search. For example- If you are looking for profiles with a multi-word title, like CFOs, you can search for “Chief Financial Officer” to get the results.

• NOT Searches- If a context has to be excluded, you type the NOT word to exclude it from the search. For example- “Manager NOT designer”.
  

• OR Searches- This search function can be used if you are looking for one or more items in the search list. This can expand your search results, For example- “Product Development OR Marketing”.
• AND Searches- This can be used if a person is looking for all items in a list. It limits the results. For example-” CFO AND CA”.
  

• Parenthetical Search- If you want a deep and complex search result, you can use Parenthesis. Like if you are looking for “Managing Director” but exclude “assistant to MD” or “Retired MD”, type “MD NOT (assistant OR Retired)”.

Few things to keep in mind regarding Boolean LinkedIn search:

• You must use uppercase letters while typing AND, OR, NOT.
• Wildcard searches “*” are not supported with LinkedIn.
• Boolean search works in the Keyword field in LinkedIn.com or Recruiter, whereas in the Company, Title, and Keyword field in Sales Navigator.

How to search on LinkedIn in Private mode?

If you want to search for profiles on LinkedIn anonymously, you can do this using the Private Mode on LinkedIn. So when someone checks their “Who viewed my Profile” option, the notification will be shown as “LinkedIn member”, and your profile will remain hidden from that person whose account you viewed. However, if you enable Private mode, you will also not get to see the list of people who viewed your profile. This list is available with Premium LinkedIn accounts only.

You can even enable “Semi-private mode”, here, your name or profile won’t be shown, but the place you are associated with, like a company, industry, or job, you will be shown as “Someone at XYZ Company” to them.

To enable private mode, Go to the “Settings” option on your LinkedIn profile and then to “Visibility”. You can now toggle the options to allow Private or Semi-private mode.

Searching for groups

When you want to interact with people significantly, you must be included in LinkedIn groups and search for groups per the specific industry. Using LinkedIn’s standard search, you can’t filter out particular groups; you can use keywords to look for relevant groups.

For example, if you search for groups using “Social Media” as a keyword, you will get to see hundreds of groups, and you can send a joining request to any of them. But you have to be careful. You can’t join groups in an unlimited way. The maximum limit is 20 for the number of groups with pending requests to join.

Once you join the groups, you can easily share your thoughts with other group members.

LinkedIn Search by Email

LinkedIn does not provide an option to search for people using their Email addresses. You can use a URL in your browser to find someone’s LinkedIn profile using their Email address.

• Open a Browser and copy and paste the following URL: https://www.linkedin.com/sales/gmail/profile/viewByEmail
  
• Now you need to add the Email address at the end of this link. It will look like this: https://www.linkedin.com/sales/gmail/profile/viewByEmail/ABC@gmail.com
  

After you run this query, you will see the LinkedIn profile of the person whose email you have added to the URL. But if they have not Linked their profile with that Email, in that case, you will not be able to fetch the profile. You can even use a data extraction or automation tool to extract LinkedIn profiles from their email address.

LinkedIn Search Limit

The search feature of LinkedIn comes with some restrictions as well. If you are using a regular LinkedIn account, you can’t go beyond 1000 profiles, or you can say you are unable to bypass the 100 pages of 10 results each. If you are a Sales navigator user, then you can search up to 2500 profiles which means 100 pages of 25 search results.

Additionally, there are monthly profile search limits also, and there is no fixed limit to this. LinkedIn tracks your activity and may limit your monthly search if they sense a non-human behaviour like:

• If you perform a lot of LinkedIn searches among 2nd or 3rd-degree LinkedIn connections.
• When you frequently search about a company and its employees, then LinkedIn may limit your search.
• If you are viewing plenty of profiles of LinkedIn users with whom you are not connected to.
• And if you are viewing loads of LinkedIn profiles from the ‘People also Viewed’ section, then also LinkedIn can detect and Limit your monthly search.

If you want to search for lots of people and reach out to them, you can refer here to safely bypass the LinkedIn search limit.

Final Takeaways On LinkedIn Search  

LinkedIn search plays a crucial role in finding the people you are looking for. Search is a very basic feature that every social media platform or website has, but what makes LinkedIn's search feature stand out is the humongous number of advanced filters offered it. LinkedIn has covered the filters fabulously. One can literally set any criteria in the search or use function-based search via Boolean search. The filters can help you the most when searching for your target audience, like for lead generation, recruitment, or sales purposes.

Private LinkedIn search can also be used if you don’t want the other person to know that you viewed their profile, here also the twist is that one can set a ‘semi-private mode’ if one decides to go partially anonymous. The LinkedIn email search feature is not directly provided in the LinkedIn platform but is easily accessible from a browser or third-party apps. And even if you are not a LinkedIn sales navigator user, you can still use basic search features to look for specific industries or jobs. In other words, the LinkedIn search is complete on its own.