We all know that with the new Linkedin changes if you want to keep accessing the database for free, you have to X-ray via a Search engine like Google or Bing. Except there is still a way to search on LinkedIn. That feature is the Alumni Search – with a bit of a URL cracking twist. In this post I explain how to use it, and share with you a handy table containing links to search for various degree holders in most countries.
1. How to trick the LinkedIn Alumni Search?
The Alumni Search’s basic usage lets you select a certain school and browse, filter or search through the LinkedIn users who chose that institute in the Education part of their profile. In the good old days you were not forced to select a certain school, you could just write in a keyword, and search in ALL the schools having that word in their name. Then LinkedIn surprisingly cancelled that feature. The good news is that while I was playing with the Alumni Search, I have noticed it’s not completely gone – we can still access it with the right URL-s.
The trick itself is easy. Going to Connections – Find Alumni, you see the alumni of your school, which looks something like this.
If you delete the id part of the URL (red underline) and rely simply on the “name” part of the URL, you can still type in keywords and force LinkedIn to bend your way. While the basic usage of searching for grads from a certain university is quite handy already, this offers you a lot more options.
Say you are looking for tech talent – instead of having to go through all the tech universities one by one, you can just write in a keyword like technical to get people from educational institutes containing the word “technical”. You can be more specific (focusing on networking certifications by going with Cisco) or more general (going for university).
It’s great if you find a great, specific pool which solves your position in itself, but in typical cases you have to start from a broader picture, and narrow it down further with filters and keywords (check point 3, as you will see the filters strongly encourage you to start broad).To be able to start strong in almost any country, I have gathered some helpful words in the table below.
2. The table
The usage of the table is (hopefully) really easy. Just start typing in the name of the country you want to search in to the Search field on the top right corner, and the corresponding row will come up – alternatively feel free to browse through all the countries. The left column pair is essentially the word “university” in many languages, while on the right are other educational organizations like colleges or institutes – the number of users in those countries is added, so you know how big of a pool can you expect.
In each row I have incorporated various languages, some not even native to the country. If you do not care about the languages use them simply as an additional pool in a decreasing order – if you do however, then they can be THE pool (great way to find Swiss Germans, Chinese Americans, etc. for example).
