Wednesday, July 27, 2005

Finding "Hidden" Colleagues in LinkedIn

Travis K posted the following useful tip to the My LinkedIn Power Forum Yahoo! Group:
I couldn't find anything on this in the archives, but my apologies if someone has noted this before: 
Problem: The "Find Colleagues" function, located under "My Contacts" or on the home page, will only show 50 colleagues at most. Unfortunately it appears to only show the first 50 colleagues that signed up on LinkedIn. If you worked for a larger company, you may have a "window" of missed colleagues between the first 50 and "Find New". I always wondered why I could see former colleagues in my network but I could not find them in my list even if the company in our profiles matched word-for-word. 
Workaround: Select the "Find New" option. You will probably only have a few new LinkedIners in the list. You'll notice that the URL in your browser looks like this:
https://www.linkedin.com/reconnect?displayReconnect=&cKey=CCOMPANY&lastAnalyzed=1121750573000
"lastAnalyzed" is a timestamp indicating a search for the date in which your contacts joined LinkedIn (or your network, not sure). If you modify the fifth digit from the left and slowly reduce the timestamp, you may end up finding colleagues that this tool would never have shown you otherwise. I ended up finding about 10 contacts that I otherwise would have had to initiate requests for. Try this with all the variations of your company names and you may dig up some useful contacts. 
If I missed something and there is a way to find these colleagues using the normal web interface, please let me know. 
Thanks,
Travis K
https://www.linkedin.com/e/fpf/2187426
Thanks to Travis for letting me share this tip on this blog.