It’s become axiomatic these days to say that if you are looking to advance your career by obtaining a new job, you absolutely must be on LinkedIn. Companies and independent recruiters have adopted it as a vital element of their candidate sourcing and vetting strategies.
Now that LinkedIn has become the 900-pound gorilla in the online employment space, and has recently been purchased by Microsoft, you can expect to see more and more changes in its user interface platform, marketing and pricing.
[See: 16 Things You’re Doing All Wrong on LinkedIn.]
In fact, LinkedIn is in the midst of rolling out a major change to its website with an eye toward simplification in more ways than one. Some users have been changed over without prior notice or choice. If you haven’t yet seen a change on your screen, rest assured that it is coming your way fairly soon.
Some changes are merely for the sake of a cleaner look and simpler user experience. You won’t be affected much by them, but you will have to spend some time figuring out where familiar things have gone.
For example, there is no longer a profile menu at the top toward the left of the page, and to view or edit your profile you’ll need to click on “Me” under your profile picture in the upper right of your page.
When you are viewing someone’s profile, you’ll see that each section of it is collapsed by default, and if you want to read their summary, see what they’ve done in any particular job and so on, you’ll have to click to expand the section.
Another cosmetic change is the look and feel of messaging your contacts, or using InMail. While the actual functioning of messaging is unchanged, the screen is now definitely friendlier.
[See: 10 Ways Social Media Can Help You Land a Job.]
While LinkedIn claims it wants to enhance the user experience and that is the motivation for its changes, it has limited the user at the same time by eliminating some features altogether, and reconfiguring others so that they are only available at various levels of paid accounts.
The search function has had a major makeover, and works differently. The former universal search available on the top black line gave drop-down search options for All, People, Jobs, Companies, Groups, Universities, Posts and Inbox. Alternatively, you could click on “Advanced” and be presented with an easy-to-follow set of fields and filters you could utilize to find the people or information you sought.
Now both the drop-down menu and the “Advanced” feature have vanished. So is the ability to search Universities as an option. If you enter “colleges in Boston” you will get several to show up, but hardly all of them.
And if you search for a particular school, for example, “Harvard University,” the top results are the options: people who studied at Harvard University, people who work at Harvard University and jobs at Harvard University.
Gone for everyone is the ability to search “posts.” This is a drawback for job seekers who could, up to this point, look through the posts of recruiters, connections or companies in their network to see a quick notice of a priority job that needs to be filled.
While free accounts used to have limited use of the InMail feature in order to send a message to anyone on LinkedIn, this is no longer the case. InMail is now a premium feature, available only to those with a paid account.
[See: The 10 Most Common Interview Questions.]
A while back, LinkedIn purchased the online learning site Lynda, with its rich set of courses for a wide variety of skills and interests. For a while, you could access these for free, but now you must take out a separate subscription, at $24.99 per month at www.linkedin.com/learning. It is available for the premium Career, Business Plus or Executive plans. Yet even the paid subscription isn’t available to Sales Navigator members.
This roll out is particularly rocky because it comes to you without either warning or choice, and without adequate tutorials in the Help section.
Further frustrating many users is the fact that there is no way to immediately access any human contact with LinkedIn, either by online chat, phone or email. The best you can do is to tweet your question to @LinkedInhelp, and hope for an answer some hours or a day or two later.
It is only reasonable to expect that LinkedIn, as a private company, always seeks to increase its revenue stream, and selling access to various parts of its incredibly large database is one among a few key ways to do so. Hence, the reality is that many who had come to benefit from free accounts will likely feel coerced to upgrade to one or another of the various premium accounts.
You will have to decide for yourself how much you are willing to pay to gain the connectivity you need to build and utilize this important job-search tool. But if you forsake it altogether, you’ll incur the costs of anonymity when you most need to be found.
Happy hunting!
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Is LinkedIn’s Latest Really the Greatest? originally appeared on usnews.com
