Hello everyone! It’s been a long time since I wrote a tech article around sourcing. I found something recently that I thought you might like.
Let’s say that you have a batch of LinkedIn recruiter profiles or a project you’d like to send to someone outside of LinkedIn. This person does not have a LinkedIn recruiter account and you don’t want to/can’t allocate them a manager seat. Which means you need to send them LinkedIn public URLs.
Problem: no export function, to access the public URL, you’d need to go to EACH profile and copy their link.
I did it yesterday on 67 profiles in less than 5 minutes. We’ll talk about a couple of concepts and tools in the article that you should research as well:
- The new URL structure for LinkedIn Recruiter projects
- Scraping tools like Dataminer or similar
- Use Bulk URL Opener (Chrome Ext.) to open batch of URLs
- TabCopy (another Chrome Ext.) to get redirected URLs
Disclaimer:
- Officially LinkedIn doesn’t offer the feature to export your LinkedIn recruiter projects and convert these URL to public URL. Probably they don’t want you to do it for legal/commercial reasons.
- Treat all data extracted according to the data protection laws of course, don’t be evil 😊
- I have the new version of LinkedIn recruiter since end of 2019, this is a newer change that happened in the last weeks. It might not work depending on the recruiter version you’re running.
- For me it appeared at the same time they reintroduced the “create search from ideal candidate” feature… because…of course.. not having this feature when they rolled out was a good idea 🤦♂️
Step 1: Have a clean recruiter list
Have a LinkedIn project and scrape it. For this test I took a few of the SourceCon Grandmasters and key figures, hope they won’t mind 😊
![](https://67.227.157.177/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/LIR_URL_Guillaume_01.png)
This is not an article about scraping but if you don’t know how to do this, either create a recipe on Dataminer or a similar scraping tool.
![](https://67.227.157.177/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/LIR_URL_Guillaume_02.png)
Convert this CSV to excel using data/convert/delimitated/commas (sorry my Excel is in French)
![](https://67.227.157.177/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/LIR_URL_Guillaume_03.png)
![](https://67.227.157.177/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/LIR_URL_Guillaume_04.png)
And you get this clean list
![](https://67.227.157.177/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/LIR_URL_Guillaume_05.png)
Step 2: Convert URLs to make it look nice
You get the Recruiter profile and project ID in this format
https://www.LinkedIn.com/talent/profile/AEMAAAxdiL0B2JdqPS2AP3RrS-CgwXpHdDX4k_c?project=386630890
Which reads like this.
https://www.LinkedIn.com/talent/profile/<recruiterprofileID>?project=<Recruiter projectID>
All you want is to convert this into standard public LinkedIn URL
https://www.LinkedIn.com/in/<recruiterprofileID>
To do this in batch, just use the search and replace function to change
![](https://67.227.157.177/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/LIR_URL_Guillaume_06.png)
And click on “replace all”
Now you have this and need to get rid of what comes after the ? (i.e. the project name)
![](https://67.227.157.177/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/LIR_URL_Guillaume_0.png)
Use again the convert function (as we did to transfer from csv to columns) under data/convert
![](https://67.227.157.177/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/LIR_URL_Guillaume_07.png)
But now select “other” and put the character ? as a selector
![](https://67.227.157.177/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/LIR_URL_Guillaume_08.png)
Now you have a clean URL list
![](https://67.227.157.177/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/LIR_URL_Guillaume_09.png)
Step 3: Get the public URLs and Add to Spreadsheet
open all tabs at once on chrome using this extension https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bulk-URL-opener-extension/hgenngnjgfkdggambccohomebieocekm?utm_source=chrome-ntp-icon
On chrome, I recommend to do it by batches of 50 max if you don’t want your computer to explode the RAM 😉
![](https://67.227.157.177/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/LIR_URL_Guillaume_10.png)
LinkedIn is redirecting you 😉
![](https://67.227.157.177/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/LIR_URL_Guillaume_11.png)
Now just gather all redirects URL in tabs with this extension https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabcopy/micdllihgoppmejpecmkilggmaagfdmb
![](https://67.227.157.177/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/LIR_URL_Guillaume_12.png)
Paste it in your excel
![](https://67.227.157.177/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/LIR_URL_Guillaume_13.png)
You, once again need to clean a little bit.
Just replace LinkedIn: by a special character like $ for example, replace all
![](https://67.227.157.177/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/LIR_URL_Guillaume_14.png)
You get this
![](https://67.227.157.177/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/LIR_URL_Guillaume_15.png)
And convert after the $ to another column
![](https://67.227.157.177/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/LIR_URL_Guillaume_16.png)
And you get this final result
![](https://67.227.157.177/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/LIR_URL_Guillaume_17.png)
Et voilà
In Conclusion
Sounds a lot of steps to a newbie but once you’ve done it a few times, the whole process takes less than 5 minutes and is easily scalable.
Hope it helps and enjoy!