It was an exciting two days at LinkedIn’s Talent Connect conference in London last week! We have plenty of highlights that we’ll share in this space shortly, but there’s one update you may have noticed in LinkedIn Recruiter already: a powerful new search tool called Similar Profiles.
If you’ve ever seen a profile and thought ‘I’d like more just like this one,’ or you have a superstar employee that you wish you could just clone, then Similar Profiles is going to be a great addition to your arsenal. Now, when you pull up a profile you like, just click the new Similar Profiles link and generate up to ninety-nine profiles just like it. The actual number of similar profiles returned will depend on the uniqueness of the profile of interest, as well as the size of related social graphs and how much profile information is present.
What makes this feature really powerful is that it uses a complex algorithm including experience, job function and social graph data that can’t be replicated in a standard search. To understand better, it’s worth repeating the comparison David Hahn, VP Product Management, made between Similar Profiles and the Pandora streaming music service. Pandora created a music genome—a riff on the human genome—that maps over 300 features of a song or band. Just enter music you already like and Pandora streams new music that has a very similar sound. Likewise, in Recruiter, we can look at lots of attributes that all add up to your perfect candidates and try to find more just like them. As with job match recommendations, you can filter the results to focus on geography, companies, and so on to refine the results to your needs.
Recruiters who have just started to use Similar Profiles are already wowed with how it extends searches in new directions and helps them find people they wouldn’t have found before. It’s in LinkedIn Recruiter now, so give it a try and let us know what you think!
Topics: LinkedIn product tips
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