Have you landed on Neptune?

Welcome to episode 142, on the week that the roll-out of the new desktop interface has really begun……Have you got it yet?

Please get in touch and let me know your thoughts if you have.

I found out from a very good source this week that LinkedIns internal name for the new user interface is ‘Neptune’ which got me thinking “How do they come up with these names?”

You might associate Neptune with the Roman God of the seas but Neptune is also a planet - Interestingly I read that Neptune is not visible to the unaided eye and is the only planet in the Solar System found by mathematical prediction rather than by empirical observation.

Could these be a reference to the removal of Advanced Search I wonder?!

Want the Old UI back? There is a short-term workaround

The guys at Autopilot for LinkedIn have devised a short term way of accessing the old UI if you wish to (I’m not recommending you do).

Here is what they had to say; We found a temporary solution for those of you who have already been rolled over to LinkedIn's "New UI" and who still want to be able to use Autopilot. For now, you can use a VPN software that allows you to change our IP address location to a country like Spain, Romania, Finland, Italy, etc (not the USA or Canada). When you are logged in to LinkedIn from an IP address that originates in an obscure country, you will be shown the OLD UI. This will buy you time for a little bit while we work on fixing the issue with how our tool works inside of LinkedIn's new UI. Go here and click the Link that says "Hide My Ass", and try out their 1 month subscription for €9.99/month, which I believe is around $10.63 USD/month.

I’m not sure this will work so be careful, I personally found that once I had the new UI, my view limits were drastically reduced in LinkedIn.com and I found my account suspended in no time!

Tags/notes and Sales Navigator

Following on from LinkedIn’s announcement that Takes and notes were no longer supported in the free version of LinkedIn and to continue using them you need to upgrade to Sales Navigator I thought I would take a closer look at how this transition works.

It doesn’t - it’s a disaster!

Yes you can upload your tags to Sales Navigator but all that does is add them to the list of tags, they are not officially assigned to a profile until you save that profile as a Lead, they are greyed out until you save.

This shows a complete lack of understanding of how we use tags.

The whole point of tags is that they are an easy way to find people you have categorised in some way - the reason you do this is because you won’t be able to remember everyone by name.

In Sales Navigator, Tags can only be used as a filter in a search result but the imported tags are not assigned to profiles until they are saved as leads….so how do you find those profiles you tagged in LinkedIn.com?

You can’t!

Slideshare Update.

An update on this subject from last week about the potential demise of Slideshare. Someone pointed out that a plausible explanation would be that LinkedIn are looking to merge Slidehare and Pointdrive. Pointdrive are a business acquired by LinkedIn earlier this year who produce a product that is used to communicate and share content with customers and prospects.

Boolean Search in the New User Interface

I have seen several people state that you can still use Boolean search queries in the new UI. I really don’t believe this is true. LinkedIn have clearly stated it is no longer supported in Recruiter Lite, so why would it be possible in the free version? I think it is easy to believe that boolean is working but this may well be the algorithm doing the work for you. I recently demonstrated the best way to search LinkedIn in this video;

Are Recruiters Walking Away From LinkedIn…..And Is This Such a Bad Thing?

I read this excellent article this week from Katrina Collier;

Recruiters, would you accept this from any other service provider?

This brings us back to the Facebook argument again! I know a little about Katrina and I have always considered her a highly credible expert in social recruiting. She doesn’t elaborate on what she means by ‘being creative’ to be able to recruit successfully via Facebook - unless you buy her training but my guess is that it involves some form of search (although career data is weak on Facebook) combined with building communities and groups.

These are all viable methods and I can’t argue with the logic of sourcing candidates from a variety of sources and the data she backs her argument with in favour of Facebook is pretty compelling.

Judging by the comments on her piece and the feedback I am getting from Recruiters, I think it’s probably true that many Recruiters will soon be spending a lot less time on LinkedIn.

Whilst LinkedIn don’t want this, I suspect they have factored it into their plan - sales of LinkedIn Recruiter are less likely to be affected, I suspect its the lower level premium accounts and free users that will walk away and LinkedIn, now backed by the financial powerhouse that is Microsoft can afford to lose some revenue in the interim period before Sales Navigator really takes off.

Are LinkedIn users going to miss Recruiters?

I doubt it!

Good Recruiters who build relationships will continue to stay active on LinkedIn (as well as other places). Facebook could be a place to talk about jobs and careers but it is not a place to talk about business, LinkedIn allows us to keep our personal lives personal and not have our Facebook time interrupted by work related subject matter.

I believe the vast majority of people feel this way.

Recruiters who are only interested in posting endless jobs and sending inappropriate messages to potential candidates will probably go to Facebook….good riddance.

This could actually help make LinkedIn a better place!

1. A voicemail question fro Jaz about the annoying habit that some users have developed of putting keywords in their name field.

2. I recently purchased the Sales Navigator. Thank you for all the information that you have put out about it. It really helped me decide if I was willing to pay for it. Now that I have it, I have a question about segmenting prospects and the recommendations that LinkedIn provides. I am a financial advisor, but I also volunteer with a couple industry organizations. So here is the issue I am having. I have many connections that are other financial professionals. They are not prospects to become my clients, however, they are prospects for joining industry, or professional organizations that I participate in. I think that because I have all these connections, LinkedIn thinks that I want to prospect other financial professionals. However, these are not the sales leads that I need. Is there a way to segment leads into potential clients and potential colleagues? How do I tell LinkedIn Sales Navigator that I want client leads that fit my target demographic (professional women, 25-40)?

I answer both questions in detail in the podcast. Go to the top of this page to listen to the show.

Mentioned in this episode:

This show was created by the original host of the show, Mark Williams.