The LinkedIn Profiles You Cannot Find With a Normal Search

Dinner with a good friend, Michiel Wiersema. Somewhere between the main course and dessert, a question came up: will you miss candidates on LinkedIn if you search by zip code, city, or province?

The answer is yes. A lot of them.

As an example, LinkedIn's Database of the Netherlands

LinkedIn holds 9.4 million profiles in the Netherlands. Standard recruiter behaviour: create a boolean string, then narrow by location. City, province, or zip code with a radius. Sensible. Efficient. And quietly wrong.

LinkedIn Recruiter or Recruiter Lite search

What happens when you select all 12 provinces in LinkedIn Recruiter?

You get roughly 7.7 million results. That means over 1.7 million people are missing. Profiles that exist in LinkedIn's database, but that a province-based search cannot see.

LinkedIn Basic or Premium search

The same test on a basic LinkedIn account returns a similar gap. Selecting all provinces gives a total somewhere above 9 million. The number is slightly lower than on Recruiter, which is expected since basic accounts do not cover the full database. But the 1.7M+ gap remains.

The profiles are there. The search just does not surface them.

I chose a different strategy for sourcing the Netherlands

Selecting all 12 provinces individually is too slow and still misses people. A better approach: set your search location to Utrecht, which sits at the geographic centre of the Netherlands, and set the radius to 200 miles (321 kilometres).

This returns around 7.7 million results and covers the entire country. It also pulls in parts of England, France, Belgium, Germany, and Luxembourg. Filter those out manually if your search requires it.

Not perfect. But significantly better than province-by-province.

What about Australia, on the other side of the world?

Australia has over 12 million profiles on LinkedIn. Searching all provinces: more than 2 million disappear. The continent is too large for a radius approach to work cleanly.

The location gap is not a Dutch problem. It applies to every country where profiles are filled in at the country level rather than city or region level.

How to solve this and find these candidates?

Select the Netherlands as your country. Then deselect all 12 provinces.

What remains are the profiles that only have "Netherlands" set as their location. Around 1.5 million of them. These are the candidates that any recruiter searching by zip code, city, or province will never find.

Note: roughly 200,000 profiles are still missing. Those appear to have no location data at all, which makes them unreachable through any location-based filter.

For Australia, the same logic applies. Deselect all provinces after selecting the country. About 100,000 profiles become visible that would otherwise be missed.

Last tip to find unicorns or purple squirrels

For a truly scarce profile, the one you would normally hunt for weeks: search the entire country, or multiple countries, without any location filter at all.

The candidate who has only filled in "Netherlands" is often the one nobody else is reaching out to. Most recruiters are fishing the same pond. The unfound 1.7 million are in a different one.