Since we published last week’s blog post (What is the Commercial Use Limit on LinkedIn?) I’ve received lots of interesting feedback from a wide range of platform users and also managed to get some more concrete results from my own experimentation.

User Input

• Commercial use limit reports have varied dramatically, but the consensus is that most LinkedIn Basic account users have been surprised by how quickly their account has reached the search limit. In addition often the limit has reached 0% with no prior warning.
• I’ve also heard from a job seeker who has now has his searches restricted, even though he has the Job Seeker premium package.
• The search limit notification takes different forms, for some users the names below the top five results are blurred for others they are visible but not clickable. This second restriction type also prevents users from using the next button from within a search entity. 

Our Results

• As mentioned previously I found it impossible to hit the search limit by searching and not viewing user profiles.
• On a separate account, once I started viewing profiles, I hit the commercial use limit on the first search of day three (82 searches in total). Technically I think I hit the limit on day two but that it wasn’t computed until day three. My reasoning behind this is that on day two I didn’t receive a 30% warning, but on day three my warning jumped straight to 0% searches remaining.

New Learnings

• The search limit is definitely quite restrictive, reports of 50-60 may be a little out, but it is less than 100.
• Don’t try to cheap the system by using a Job Seeker account instead of Business Plus, it won’t work.
• Two potential solutions that could extend your commercial search limit are to either view as many profiles as you can on each search or to only view search results if absolutely critical on that search. This is because it appears that searches which don’t include profile views aren’t counted towards your use limit, and that it doesn’t matter how many profiles you view, each search is only counted as one.
• Avoid carrying out too many searches (30+) in one day. This way you will see the 30% warning and be able to manage your search volume over the remainder of the month.
• We raised this one last week but it deserves a mention again. Access blocked search results by viewing the last visible profile and then clicking next profile.

The Recruiting Community's Response

The Prominence X-ray search desk side cheat sheets and saved LinkedIn Google Searches have been very popular since the last post, indicating that a lot of recruiters are opting to continue working from Basic LinkedIn accounts. Recruitment Managers at larger agencies appear to be the most frustrated group, because these changes have resulted in their businesses having to incur extra costs that run into the tens of thousands of dollars. Maybe it is time to spend some of that hard earned commission on shares in LinkedIn....

About The Author

Chris has worked in the recruitment industry for 8 years, where he has been fortunate enough to spend considerable time getting to know the inner workings of three different recruitment sectors construction, technology and energy.

Most recently whilst recruiting high end technical professionals for the oil and gas industry in Houston, Chris was exposed to one of the most challenging labour markets in the world. The sourcing solutions he learnt to apply were far ahead of those that he had been exposed to back home, so he decided to return to New Zealand and share these insights with the local recruitment marketplace.

Now at Prominence Chris focuses on working with both agencies and employers to up-skill recruiters on social recruiting and also to advise on social employment branding. Through Prominence Chris also volunteers at tertiary education facilities to provide real world advice to students and career counsellors on how best to utilise social media for job search purposes.

Chris can be found on Twitter @findsouth

A note from the RecruitingBlogs.com Team:

Our LinkedIn CSE search tool is also an option for getting around these new restrictions.