QuickTip: Find Jobs by City or State on LinkedIn

Anybody who follows this blog regularly knows that one of biggest pet peeves is Bad Interface Design, and social media sites are masters when it comes to this. One of the worst has to be the way LinkedIn lets people search for jobs based on geographic location.

For some inexplicable reason, LinkedIn gives you exactly two choices for location: Anywhere and by Zip Code.

Quick: What's the zip code for Raleigh, North Carolina?... I thought so. (Never mind the fact that most cities have multiple zip codes.) And I don't know many people who, when they're looking for a job, are looking for one ANYWHERE in the world (Azerbaijan anyone?).

I do, however, know plenty of people who will look in multiple cities in their area or would be interested in moving elsewhere in their state or to other states, but with this system, it would require multiple separate (non-saveable) searches to find those.

While they do allow you to choose a radius from a certain zip code, the maximum is 100 miles, which doesn't do you any good if you're looking in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Or you might be willing to work in certain cities in your area but not others (for example, due to commute reasons), but you're still going to get the results from all those cities if they're the same distance from your central point.

The weird thing is, there are plenty of examples of searching based on city, region, state, etc. in all sorts of other sites that use a geographically based search, including other job boards, real estate sites, and online dating services. So I haven't got a clue why LinkedIn insists on sticking with this bizarre system. I submitted a question about this in October 2007 and one of their employees gave this reply:

Currently, we offer a radius search by zip code for the US (and a few other countries). In other words, you can search for people within 100 miles of a postal code, etc. We're working on adding other countries and 'near city X'/'within state Y'—expect them within a month or so.

That's a heckuva long month!

Okay, now that my rant is done, there is a way around this limitation. First pick Anywhere from the dropdown list, then enter the name of the city or state you're interested in in the Search For field at the top of the search form. If you're looking at multiple cities, separate them with OR (note it must be in uppercase).

Now, as you can see by the listing for Kansas City, this isn't 100% exact because the search engine will look for the keywords in any field in the job listing. But it still gives you better results than the default system does.

Did this post help you? Share it with others!