LinkedIn 3rd Level Connection Profile Visibility

Here is a clarification on something fellow recruiters have been worried about. This is as of this morning and anything can change at any time, of course.

If you search for LinkedIn profiles on Google or on Bing (EXAMPLE), you might see an incomplete profile for those members who are either your 3rd level connections or are out-of-your-network and a suggestion to upgrade, when you click on the search results in Google. Don't worry; nothing much has changed in terms of profile visibility. The only thing that has happened is this:

If you are logged into your account on LinkedIn it is now getting you straight to the person's profile, bypassing the “see full profile” button that used to be there.

So if you are logged in you will see less info and a suggestion to upgrade. Log out and you will see the complete public profile, as Google sees it.

LOG OUT of LinkedIn and you will see the public profile - with more information.

To speed up work you could use two different browsers and be logged-in in one, logged-out in another.

Irina

LI Profile

Comment by Bob Sharpe on September 18, 2012 at 9:08am: Thank you, Irina, for sharing your knowledge so freely.

Comment by Irina Shamaeva on September 18, 2012 at 10:15am: Any time :)

Another option that Lance of ERE has reminded me of is to use an incognito window in your browser.

Comment by Jason Alba on September 18, 2012 at 2:50pm: Always great stuff Irina, thank you. I shared this on my LinkedIn blog today, with a follow-up breaking down your example search in two days :) www.ImOnLinkedInNowWhat.com

Comment by Stacey Boyer on September 18, 2012 at 2:59pm: Google search: site:linkedin.com keywords

to bypass the connections completely and search the entire linkedin database. It's called x-raying and it's an AIRS technique. Very effective for linkedin

Comment by Irina Shamaeva on September 18, 2012 at 4:39pm: Stacey - thanks for your comment. It's Google techniques, not AIRS (though AIRS teaches it). An example is shown above (EXAMPLE), and this is exactly what I am talking about in this post.

Also it will not show the entire LinkedIn database.

Comment by Irina Shamaeva on September 18, 2012 at 9:10pm: Jason,

Nice to hear from you! :) I have known about your book and your activity helping job seekers for a long time now.

Make sure your readers know about the latest changes: to share a profile and view the name for someone outside of your network you now need to use a URL and paste a LinkedIn profile ID. This is because the "share" functionality has been taken away from the drop-down menus.

We should chat at some point. I'd be glad to see what else I can share that is of use. Irina