I was exploring LinkedIn's site the other day and came across a chart buried at the bottom of the LinkedIn Learning Center page, and I was intrigued by the possibility of "hand coding" searches by entering LinkedIn's advanced search operators directly into the "people search" search bar.

Here is the chart I found:

When I saw this chart, I was excited to try out LinkedIn's advanced search operators. It appears you can "hand code" searches using the above advanced operators and control most of the search fields/parameters that are found on the advanced search page interface, such as current company, past company, title, current title, past title, zip code radius, company, school, industry, interested in, and when people joined LinkedIn:

LOCATION SEARCHING

You'll notice on the chart of operators that the zip: and radius: operators have "dependencies" - zip: is dependent on country:, and radius: is dependent on country: and zip:. For example, if you were searching for people in a 25 mile radius of Washington, DC, you could create a search like this:

country:"united states" zip:20001 radius:25

When using LinkedIn's advanced operators, you enter them directly into the "Search People" bar at the top right of LinkedIn:

When you hit "Search," you'll get nearly 658,000 results of people on LinkedIn who live within 25 miles from the zip code of 20001.

It appears you can only choose the radius values of 10, 25, 35, 50, 75, and 100 miles when using the radius: operator. If you try and use a different number, like 30, LinkedIn will produce results using the closest "valid" radius value. In this case, when picking 30, I was trying to trick LinkedIn - it chose 25 instead of 35.

COMBINING MULTIPLE ADVANCED OPERATORS

Let's look for people who currently work for Deloitte, have a current title of manager, and live within 25 miles of 20001:

ccompany:deloitte ctitle:manager country:"united states" zip:20001 radius:25

Here is a snippet of the search results:

COMBINING BOOLEAN OPERATORS WITH LINKEDIN'S ADVANCED OPERATORS

You can combine "regular" search terms and Boolean operators along with LinkedIn's advanced operators. For example, let's search for people who currently work at Deloitte, currently havea title of "manager," live within 25 miles of 20001 in DC, and mention audit, audits, auditor, or auditing on their LinkedIn profile.

ccompany:deloitte ctitle:manager country:"united states" zip:20001 radius:25 (audit OR auditor OR audits OR auditing)

Here is a snippet from one of the results:

COMBINING CCOMPANY: AND PCOMPANY:

LinkedIn does not appear to properly process search strings that combine ccompany: and pcompany: operators. For example, if you were to try and run a search looking for people currently at Deloitte and previously and KPMG, your search should look like this:

ccompany:deloitte pcompany:kpmg

However, if you run that search you will find that LinkedIn will essentially ignore the ccompany:deloitte and only return results of profiles of people who have previously worked at KPMG.

So it appears that you cannot create searches combining the ccompany: and pcompany: advanced operators.

USING LINKEDIN'S ADVANCED OPERATORS IN "OR" STATEMENTS

Be careful when attempting to use some of LinkedIn's advanced operators in OR statements. I have not found any specific search syntax that works perfectly when attempting to combine LinkedIn's Advanced Search Operators in OR statements. For example, here are three different ways of trying to search for people with a current title of 1 or more of 3 specific titles:

(ctitle:engineer OR ctitle:admin OR ctitle:administrator)
ctitle:(engineer OR admin OR administrator)
ctitle:"engineer OR admin OR administrator"

LinkedIn seems to prefer the last search syntax, suggested by Alexander Fedossov . However, even using that search syntax returns some results in which the ctitle: search terms are highlighted not only in the current title field - but in many cases they can also be found highlighted in past titles, and even in the "body" of profiles as well. As such, it's quite difficult to tell exactly what's going on when using the ctitle: and ccompany: LinkedIn search operators when used in an OR statement.

For the time being, I suggest using only 1 company and 1 title at a time when attempting to leverage LinkedIn's advanced search operators.

SORTING AND MODIFYING YOUR RESULTS

After you execute your "hand coded" search using LinkedIn's advanced operators, you have the option of sorting the results by the usual values and you can also modify your search just as you can if you had constructed your search using LinkedIn's advanced search interface.

SAVING YOUR SEARCHES

Although you can save searches via LinkedIn's "save this search" feature - if you are using LinkedIn with a free account, you are limited to saving 3 searches. An added benefit of being able to craft complete search strings using LinkedIn's advanced operators is that you can create and save your search strings in Notepad or Word and simply copy and paste them into LinkedIn to run them, as well as quickly copy/build and modify new search strings.

CONCLUSION

If you enjoy "hand coding" Boolean search strings, it's nice to know that you can take advantage of nearly all of LinkedIn's major search options/parameters (such as current/past company, current/past title, zip code radius, industry, etc.) by combining LinkedIn's advanced operators with standard Boolean logic.