LinkedIn People Search: "It's People Alerts (via email), Stupid"

LinkedIn People Search - Email Alerts
Originally uploaded by davemc500hats

LinkedIn buried the lede on the recent launch of their new LinkedIn People Search feature set.

The new feature they probably should have highlighted more clearly is People Search Alerts via Email.

You can now save up to 3 searches for common keywords, job titles, company names, or other topic-specific searches, and get them emailed to your inbox on a weekly or monthly basis.

I do several of these types of searches via Google alerts for company- & product-specific searches on news & blogs. Now you can also do them for people as well on LinkedIn.

Yotify also allows you to do saved search notifications via email for products for sale & other classified listings.  Simply Hired does alerts for jobs.  Spock is another service that does comprehensive people search. (disclosure: i'm an investor in Simply Hired, and an advisor to Spock.  i'm a friend of the founder of Yotify, Ron Bouganim.  and i'm an informal advisor to LinkedIn, but not on this topic)

i haven't done a thorough review of these types of search & notification services, but there are many of them.  That said, their value is directly correlated to the quality of their search (crappy search with notification isn't that useful... however great, targeted search with notification is quite useful).

Comments

[Dave]

@tom: agreed, altho i wasn't focusing so much on new hires / recruiters... that was being reported by others.

i think it's more interesting for watching moves / profile changes in general... and for more folks than just recruiters.

[Tom Blue]

Or maybe there wasn't a lede to begin with. I think everyone is overestimating the value of these new features. These aren't alerts of new hires. They are just alerts of people who just joined the network. That is a huge distinction in the eyes of recruiters. They might see benefit in knowing an additional person at a specific company, but this is not the same as in being alerted when someone was just hired or fired/resigned at a company. Alerts like these are a huge benefit to 3rd party recruiting firms for a number of reasons and there have been services that provide these alerts since the 1.0 days.

[Julien]

Hey, you can also get your alerts through Notifixious and we support Text Messages, emails and most of the IM! + we've got a nice API that developer can use to create 3rd party channels/applications to be notified anywhere you want!

I am using it for my LinkedIn Network updates and it's working like a charm ;-)