9 tips to make use of LinkedIn's Advanced Search Operators

Finding the right person in a business network of 55+ million professionals is like attempting to search for a dropped pearl in the ocean bed. It is just not easy. You cannot find the exact man or woman you are looking for, unless you use certain of LinkedIn’s advanced search operators. So, how to do that? This post will detail on how to search advanced search options on Linked network.

LinkedIn Search Box

LinkedIn’s simple search box is the key to finding an individual with all qualifications you need. It has the following options to find the desired results easily, hands-down.

People: If you know a person’s exact name and want to search based on that, you can choose this option. You can search for your colleague, friend, business partner, candidate etc. when you use this search feature.

Jobs: This is a job search option which is highly useful for job-seekers. You can type the name/key term of your profile (in your industry) and get access to all the jobs available under the key term.

Companies: This option allows user to search information about a company. Useful for both job seekers, recruiters and other companies.

Answers: This feature allows you to ask questions regarding your doubts on a particular topic.

Inbox: You can find your inbox messages easily through the LinkedIn search

Groups – Groups in LinkedIn mean a lot. Group search feature will provide you all information about a particular company, industry etc.

LinkedIn Advanced Search Operators

There are certain advanced search operators that help you get desired results in LinkedIn search. Here are a few practical tips on how to use them:

1. Quoted Searches
Like in search engines, we have an option to find the exact phrase. For example we will take query1 which will provide the people who is in the position of Sr. Manager (at a company), query2 will give you the project manager profiles alone.
Query1: “Sr. Manager”
Query2:“project manager”

2. NOT Operator:
If you want to exclude some search terms from your results, you can use NOT operator. For instance, if you want to search project manager profile excluding results from the United Kingdom, your query should be:
Query: “project manager” NOT United kingdom

3. OR Operator:
If you would like to search for profiles which include one of two or more terms, you can use OR operator. For example, you want to know who is Managing Director or CEO of a company, then you can separate those terms with the upper-case word OR.
Query: Managing Director OR CEO

4. AND Operator:
If you would like to search for profiles which include two terms, you need to use upper-case word AND to separate the terms
Query: Manging Director AND CEO

5. Parenthetical Searches
If you would like to do a complex search. For instance, find the Vice Presidents or Directors of Divisions, you can combine terms like this: VP OR (director AND division). This will find people who have VP in their profiles, or have director AND division in their profiles.
Query: VP OR (director AND division)

6. Title Operator:
If you would like to find out the executive positions in an specific industry, then the ‘title’ operator will help you to do it. This operator will help employers to find suitable candidates, will guide people in the expansion of the network with similar title people. For example, we will search for executives alone then title:executive will show your desired result. However you can use present title as ptitle: and current title as ctitle if you want to be more specific.
Query: title:executive

7. Company Operator:
If you would like to find out the specific company profiles then you can use the operator called ‘company:’. Lets take an example of people working in Yahoo, then you need to use company:yahoo inc. Further you can divide it current company as ccompany and past company as pcompany
Query: company:Yahoo Inc

8. School Operator:
If you would like to search for your school guys on LinkedIn, you have an option called school operator. For instance, if you want to search the profiles of your Anna University friends on LinkedIn, you need to use
Query: school:”Anna University”

9. Country Operator:
Sometimes we require only people who from specific nations. The country operator gets this done. This operator will help you to get some people’s email address to reach them for business purpose too. For example, you want to find the CEO list available in US to send them a mail, you can use the following query
Query: title:CEO country:United States