There has been a merry old dance this past week with a lot of users who spend a good amount of time on LinkedIn getting rather upset, including myself, as we discovered that the ability to engage in true networking on LinkedIn had taken a bit of a dent.
Essentially, it seemed as though the ability to search through the connections of your 1st level connections had been removed – well, a week later and it’s back again after a bit of “not sure what’s going on” from LinkedIn’s Customer Experience Advocates (Customer Service Reps to you and I).
In case you are unsure what all the fuss is about, the culprit is the little magnifying glass shown below which gives us the opportunity to do a search through the profiles of the connections of an individual connection, perhaps to request a referral of them in the most targeted of ways:
Anyway, in the interim, myself and a number of others took the time to look at other ways to access this functionality and I have seen posted in a number of places a second suggested route to find these details.
My issue was that it didn’t go far enough because it didn’t allow us to do a full advanced search through our connections’ connections … however, with a little bit of playing, I have found a way to get full advanced search of connections which I believe to be HUGELY beneficial!
The first part is quite functional, so bear with me:
- You need to find your connection, so type their name in the search box at the top of the page and click on the search icon;
- Under their name (next to ‘similar’) if they have left their connections open, you should see a number, which is the number of connections they have which displays in green (BTW – no number, then you can’t search their connections);
- You should now see a list of their connections in the ‘search results’ format that I’m sure you are used to. Here if you wish, you can filter by location, industry, connection level
- However, if you try to do an advanced search and search by current job title for example, the system reverts to a full search results, not just those of the person you are looking at.
What we would like instead is to get full search options at this point but still focusing purely on the network of our connection.
So how do we achieve this?
I’m glad you asked…
However, rather than more text, the best way is to show you which you will see below.
For reference, the piece of code I refer to is: &pivotType=cofc
And if you wish to get straight to the key part then go to timestamp 3:00 or click here instead and it will take you directly there.
Hope it opens up even more opportunities!
