February 21, 2017 / in LinkedIn / by Jason Terry
Author: Jason Terry
Over the last few months, LinkedIn has been rolling out some pretty major user interface changes. People are saying that it resembles Facebook a bit more, and I tend to agree. It’s taken me some time to figure out where things were moved to and the new way to get to them. Sadly, some things were taken away completely.
The screenshot below is an example of what your new Home layout looks like. The icon bar across the top has Home, My Network, Jobs, Messaging, Notifications, Me and More. If you’ve subscribed to Sales Navigator, you will have a link to that on the far right as well.
View and Edit Your Profile
To view and edit your profile, you can simply click the badge or your profile pic on the left sidebar, or you can click the Me icon in the top menu bar and then click the View Profile link that comes up.
Public Profile URL
When you view your profile, the URL in the browser is now your public profile URL. It wasn’t always like that. We’ve been teaching clients to “claim their name” by personalizing the URL to their public profile for eight years. It’s even more important now that this public profile URL is displayed when anyone views your profile. Mine looks like this: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonterry.
If you haven’t claimed your name, it would look something like this: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jason-terry-b1945211.
See all those extra letters and numbers? It looks more professional when you customize your LinkedIn URL. (To change it, go to your profile, click the edit public profile link in the right sidebar, your public profile page comes up and in the upper right corner click the pencil icon next to Edit Public Profile URL.)
Summary
A big change that I’m not a fan of is how they handle your LinkedIn Summary. We believe the LinkedIn Summary is incredibly helpful and therefore important for the person checking your profile out on LinkedIn. It takes a little work to fill it out… and we see profiles all the time with poor summaries or no summary at all.
LinkedIn decided to hide everything but the first 240 characters of your summary behind a “Read more” link. So make sure the first couple of sentences of your summary are interesting with the hope of getting the person viewing your profile to click “Read more” for your full summary.
Profile Section Order
The Education, Volunteer, Experience, Recommendations, Skills and Endorsements sections are all still available, but you can’t reorder the order in which they appear on your profile. They are fixed in place in a specific order.
Your Connections
You can view your connections in the “My Network” area of the site. It’s been redesigned as well, it’s more spacious, and I think the layout is cleaner. The left sidebar has the number of connections you have displayed prominently… you used to have to hunt a bit to find that number.
The main area of My Network lists open invitations you’ve received to connect as well as the People You May Know section.
To see all your connections, click “See all” under your connection count in the left sidebar. The resulting screen shows all your connections. You used to be able to sort and view your connections in lots of ways, but now you can only sort on First Name, Last Name and Recently Added. Not a big deal for me, but might be frustrating for others.
Search
A lot has changed in search functionality. I used to use the Advanced Search feature most of the time. It had tons of filters that you could use to narrow your search results. Advanced Search is no longer available. BUMMER.
You can still filter your searches with general location, company and connection level (1st degree, 2nd degree, etc.)
LinkedIn moved much of the Advanced Search functionality into Sales Navigator. So if you used to use Advanced Search in your prospecting, you might have to upgrade to Sales Navigator to continue prospecting the way you were able to before all the changes.
In Closing…
These are just a few of the changes that were made recently on LinkedIn. I’m still figuring out where things are at. Overall, I like the changes because the layout is easier to understand and there’s more whitespace so things don’t feel so cramped.
My favorite change is that LinkedIn FINALLY added a button labeled “Add a Note” when sending a connection request to someone. We’ve been coaching people to customize their invitations for a long time, and now it’s a lot easier to remember to do that.
Have you been struggling with the new LinkedIn layout? Let me know with an email or comment… I would love to hear from you!
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Todd Searls
President and Founder, Praesidio Healthcare Consulting
Hey Jason!
Do you happen to know if the new layout is only available to LinkedIn Premium users? Reason I’m asking – I recently transitioned from sales to operations here at Callcap, and the company only paid for premium accounts for the sales team members; thus, I was bumped down to the standard, free profile. This has been fine for me but my layout still looks the same as it always has. I tried looking for a “Try the new layout” button just in case it was an opt-in currently, but I’m not seeing anything. Perhaps it hasn’t been rolled out to all users?
Thanks for the insight as always.
Hi Scott! I got your comment/question on my post about LinkedIn’s new interface. I can tell you that there are still people that haven’t gotten the new look and feel, but it will get to you eventually… the free accounts get the new interface as well… I have verified that.
Thanks for taking the time to read our blog! I really appreciate it and glad you are getting value from it.
Jason
I agree with your observations. I wish they would change the Summary back to where you can read the whole section, without having to open it each time. It’s one of the most important sections.
Thanks for the post. I have a question for you. I’m now getting notifications for people’s birthdays — much more than I used to, I believe, and perhaps in conjunction with the recent overall changes. Is there a way to opt out of birthday notifications? Please??
Hi Tim! Thank you for your question and response to my blog post about all the new LinkedIn changes. I appreciate you taking the time to read.
At this time, there is no way to turn off those Birthday LinkedIn notifications. If you Google it, you will see a boatload of other frustrated people that feel the same way… it should be an option to turn off.
If you are able to do filtering rules in your email client, you could filter those into a folder for later review so that they aren’t clogging up your inbox… the rule might have “birthday” in the subject and gets moved… you would need to play around with that.