How did LinkedIn screw up search this badly?

[Andropov]

I've been looking for open positions on LinkedIn for the first time in forever and I'm astonished by how hilariously bad it is. I'm not even mad, it's just incredibly funny how a big company with a product whose main purpose is to help people find jobs has completely broken its job search feature. Kinda reminds me of how Dropbox is focusing in literally everything but their main purpose (syncing files between computers), and now the core functionality is not even working properly due to sheer neglect.

Some examples. If I search for 'iOS pharmaceutical' (I had just found an open position in a company that helped find medical trials using a companion iOS app, and I wanted to see if there were other similar positions). For that search, LinkedIn show 3 pages of results, full of... offers for senior rendering / game engine physics applications. What? Maybe the algorithm got confused because the positions are for mobile games and mention iOS on the body of the job description? Nope. They're all PC or console focused, no mention of iOS (and certainly not of 'pharmaceutical' at all in the entire description).

Maybe the search keywords were too niche. Let's try with something else: 'iOS Developer'. Surely there are thousands of those, so the first dozen or so pages of search results should be full of iOS development positions, right? Nope. On the very first page, among some actual iOS developer positions LinkedIn is also showing: a MLOps position, a senior position for a Unreal Engine game project asking for C/C+, a React Native + CSS position, a 'Senior Platform Engineer' position for AWS management, a backend position (SQL, Kafka), a Firmware Engineer position for IoT devices... None of those jobs even mention iOS!
The second page is even worse. 3 out of 4 jobs shown are not for iOS developers and don't even mention it.

What's happening here? It seems to me that LinkedIn developed an algorithm to inject jobs based on your CV keywords regardless of your search terms. Probably because of 'engagement' or another dumb metric. But this makes the search completely unusable since every search ends up showing the same results, no matter what you're searching for

 

[Eric]

What's happening here? It seems to me that LinkedIn developed an algorithm to inject jobs based on your CV keywords regardless of your search terms

I think this is exactly it, recruiters get priority when they pay to put their jobs listed and the end result is losing relevancy for the one searching for the job. IMO LinkedIn went from one of the best resources to the worst, primarily because they do things like make you pay to see who is searching for you and regularly spam you with advertising for it. This also results in people refusing to interact or even look at your job openings if they're casually browsing.

As you say, targeting has turned into shit. At one time it was really awesome and it's sad to see how they've butchered it as they've tried to monetize everything, as one who interviewed a lot of people that came from them I can say the quality of candidates was also pretty poor.

Recruiters (and LInedIn alike) look for keywords and a count of them in a resume, then target based off of that, so you can have 6 months experience and they'll refer you to a senior level opening type of thing.

 

[Andropov]

I think this is exactly it, recruiters get priority when they pay to put their jobs listed and the end result is losing relevancy for the one searching for the job.

Hm this is weird. I went back to the search after reading this, guessing that search results that are promoted probably have some kind of identifier. And yes, the weird non-relevant search results had a small "Promoted" tag at the bottom. I thought that was it, but upon further inspection I realized that ~80% of the search results are promoted (so non-relevant ads having the "Promoted" tag isn't anything unique to them), and also found out that there are a lot of non-relevant results that do not have the "Promoted" tag. So it's probably a combination of recruiters paying to promote results AND something else.

Recruiters (and LInedIn alike) look for keywords and a count of them in a resume, then target based off of that, so you can have 6 months experience and they'll refer you to a senior level opening type of thing.

Oh that explains a few of the experiences I've had in the past.

 

[Alli]

I hate LinkedIn. You can’t even leave it. When my father died, I closed out all his social media accounts. Except LinkedeIn, which wouldn’t let me. I wound up just posting his obit and hoping for the best.

You should see what they send me for jobs.

 

[Andropov]

I hate LinkedIn. You can’t even leave it. When my father died, I closed out all his social media accounts. Except LinkedeIn, which wouldn’t let me. I wound up just posting his obit and hoping for the best.

You should see what they send me for jobs.

I'm sorry to hear that. I thought there were legal mechanisms in place *specifically* to ensure that this kind of things never happened. I can't fathom how LinkedIn is missing basic features like that while building tons of needless monetized shit that no one is using.

Also related to the absurd limitations they aren't bothering to fix: apparently you can't even change your profile language. You can provide additional languages, but the base language of the profile is set in stone from the moment you create your account. If you need to change it you have to create a new profile. This shouldn't matter much since you can provide translations to other languages, but some features (like the profile download button recruiters use) apparently only work with the base language.

 

[throAU]

Just download one of their many database leaks and search the plaintext that way