My 24 Hours Income Team Impact: LinkedIn Overhauls Desktop Site

Thursday, January 19, 2017

LinkedIn Overhauls Desktop Site

“Conversations and content” were the key elements of LinkedIn’s overhaul of its desktop experience.

Director of engineering Chris Pruett introduced the redesign in a blog post, saying that it will roll out to all users worldwide “in the coming weeks.”

Pruett stressed that navigation on LinkedIn’s desktop site has been simplified into seven core areas—Home (Your Feed), Messaging, Jobs, Notifications, Me, My Network and Search—and access to other features, such as LinkedIn Learning, is available via the “more” icon.

Pictured below are the old and new LinkedIn desktop site designs, respectively:

Pruett also provided an overview of improved areas covered by the redesign:

Smarter messaging that helps you connect and unlock new opportunities: With our new real-time messaging interface, you can message a connection wherever you are on LinkedIn. We’ll also start serving up insights across the site to help you break the ice in any conversation and connect you to your next opportunity. For example, if you see a new job posting you’re interested in, we’ll suggest someone within your network who works at the company.
Richer feed to keep you informed: With a combination of algorithms and human editors working together, we’ve fine-tuned your feed to surface the most relevant content from people and publishers you care most about. We’ll also be adding new ways for you to dive deep into specific topics relevant to you and follow trending stories.
More intuitive search: You now have one universal search box to easily find people, jobs, companies, groups and schools. You can refine your search by using filter options on the right-hand side, with the ability to search posts coming soon. Also, we’re investing further to better understand signals on what or who you are searching for so we can bring you the best results for any search query.
Greater insight into who’s viewing your content: You can now see who’s reading and engaging with the content you share, including the company, job title and location of the people who are interested in your updates.
Better suggestions to make your profile stand out: We’ve improved profile suggestions so you can more easily see what you need to do to look your best professionally–for example, suggested skills based on what recruiters are searching for.

In a separate blog post, director of product management, search and discovery David Flink provided a host of tips on how to best use LinkedIn’s search functionality:

If you want to do a more detailed search for a specific person on LinkedIn:

Type his or her name into the search box. You can select from the suggestions in the drop-down list.

Or hit enter to go to the search results page and click the people filter at the top to see only people results. You can narrow your search by using the filter options on the right-hand side, such as location, company, past company, industry and school.

From the search results page, select a member’s name to view his or her profile. Here you can message them, connect with them or follow them for future interactions.

If you want to search and add an alert for a job function, university or company:

Type a job function or company into the search box. You can select from the suggestions in the drop-down list.

Or hit enter to go to the search results page, where you can narrow down your search results by clicking the jobs search filter and using the filter options on the right-hand side, such as location and company.

If you want to set up a search alert for example for a specific job title or company you can do so. Once you’ve put in your search, click on “create search alert” and set up to receive via email or text when new job openings are listed.

For the power search members out there, we’ve added a set of five search operators to help you narrow down your search results directly from the search box:

firstname: Finds members based on first name.

lastname: Finds members based on last name.

title: Finds members based on their current title.

company: Finds members based on their current company (keyword search).

school: Finds members based on schools attended (keyword search).

Search operators complement the filters on the right-hand side of the results page and the and, or and not boolean operators.

Here’s a quick example: To search for current software engineers not named Doe, who have attended either Harvard University or Stanford University, try: title:”software engineer” NOT lastname:doe school:(harvard OR stanford).

When using search operators, remember to use quotes for multiword search terms and parentheses for and, or and not phrases.