A client contacted me this week because for the first time they had seen the notice, whilst doing LinkedIn searches, “You are approaching your limit for searches”.
One day later they were told that was it for this month unless they wanted to upgrade to one of the top end accounts.
This seems to be happening more and more, which suggests that LinkedIn is changing the way free accounts can be used. It’s probably not surprising as some of their other revenue sources, especially advertising, seems to be waning.
You might be experiencing the same issues so I though it useful to share what I advised my client;
How many profiles have you looked at? If you have suddenly starting looking at dozens and before that they were very low numbers then LinkedIn gets ‘suspicious’ that you might be a spammer. Unfortunately no one knows how their system decides all this and it varies.
What is the LinkedIn limit on search? According to one source;
- A progress bar appears in your search results when only 30% of your search requests are left
- It continues to remind you in 5% increments
- After you’ve reached the limit, you can continue searching, but you will see a limited number of results (this is very limited, usually just a few).
Having said that LinkedIn has also been tightening the rules on search limits, it seems like a way to sell their higher priced packages.
There are a few possible ways around this;
1. Doing Boolean searches on Google instead of the LinkedIn platform. There is a rumour this is changing and they are starting to track IP addresses but no confirmation of this yet. Here are tips on boolean searching http://talent.linked
http://booleanstrings.com/2015
2. There is also this search tool – http://www.intel-sw.com/blog
3. This is an article explaining more and telling you about LinkedIn XRay http://recruitmentgeek.co
4. Alumni search is also not restricted so you can search by School, College or University
5. Groups can also be useful to interact and make connections. It used to be unlimited but now you are limited to a few invitations to connect with Group members per month.
And you should be doing this anyway, but check the connections of your 1st connections – there are probably quite a few there that you can ask for introductions or reach out and connect with directly.
Have a brandtastic week
Paul
P.S. If this sounds like too much or you are having trouble knowing where to start with LinkedIn, it’s hard to know what the right actions are to get the right results and its a steep learning curve that you don’t have time to take. One of our brand new LinkedIn packages might be the answer https://pcunlimited.wpengine.com/linkedin/