7 Effective Ways to Find Someone on LinkedIn

Estimates suggest that around 30% of people use LinkedIn in the U.S.

This usage figure may pale in comparison to some of the top social media sites, such as Facebook and Instagram. But LinkedIn is like no other.

LinkedIn is an excellent tool for discovering and connecting with people to expand your industry network, speed up your job searching efforts, build customer databases, and source potential clients.

Whatever your reasons for interacting on this platform, finding someone on it isn’t always easy. In this article, we discuss our top tips to speed up your search with effective results.

How to Find Someone on LinkedIn

Browsing many user profiles may seem a daunting task when you’re trying to identify a specific person.

Fortunately, there are several search options you can adopt to find people on LinkedIn with the least possible hassle.

Here’s what we recommend.

Use the LinkedIn Search Bar

LinkedIn has some of the most sophisticated search features among social media sites.

To access them, click the People icon at the top of the site’s home page. Here, you can find platform users by entering a first and last name on the search bar.

However, to search LinkedIn using advanced search options, logging in or creating your own profile is a must. Once logged in, you can narrow down a LinkedIn search by people, posts, companies, groups, and other search criteria.

There are also search filters to refine the results based on the connection degree, job title, location, company name, school, industry, and similar search terms.

Sync Your Contact List With LinkedIn

To make it easier to find people you know, LinkedIn offers the option to sync your contacts.

You can find the Syncing feature under Settings. When you click it, the site will take you to a separate page to sync contacts from several sources — your phone, Google, and Outlook (both personal and work).

Once you turn this feature on, you no longer need to search for people when you have their phone number or email in your contact lists. The platform will automatically detect the contacts with a LinkedIn account and indicate them for you to send a connection request.

Check Suggested LinkedIn Connections

On the My Network page, LinkedIn lists “People you may know” to help expand your network. This AI-powered feature is designed to identify similarities between users and make suggestions to connect.

For instance, LinkedIn could suggest present and former employees of a company you’ve worked at or those from the college you attended. It can also look at your industry interests and 2nd- and 3rd-degree connections to recommend members you may want to connect with.

So, if the person you’re searching for is connected to you through work, school, or some other way, it would be a good idea to browse profiles suggested by LinkedIn.

Review Connections of Mutual Contacts

Sometimes, the person you want to find could be known to others in your LinkedIn network. If that’s the case, all you need to do is visit the relevant member’s profile page and click on the “[number] connections” field listed in the brief bio at the top.

Clicking this will take you to a list of all their 1st-degree connections. If you find the person in question, send them an invitation to connect or ask your mutual connection for an introduction.

Keep in mind that many LinkedIn members deactivate this feature nowadays. However, checking it will only take a few minutes, so it’s still worth a try.

Sign Up for LinkedIn Sales Navigator

Created for prospecting purposes, this is a paid tool that offers a variety of useful search features that aren’t available with a basic membership.

For instance, it provides over 50 advanced filters to make searching profiles easier by using industry, location, function, and other criteria.

With the help of Sales Navigator, you can also map relationships to find warm introductions and integrate your databases to update details of existing and potential clients.

The InMail feature lets you contact users directly, while profile recommendations make it much more effortless to identify people to network with based on your activity and mutual connections.

Search on Nuwber

Nuwber is a popular people search engine and a powerful tool for identifying verified personal information. It relies on public sources to find useful data relating to millions of individuals in its searchable directory.

A search results page on Nuwber can produce much more information than a link to a LinkedIn profile. It can retrieve a person’s location, email address, contact number, age, as well as details about those connected to them, such as relatives and neighbors.

So, apart from finding someone’s LinkedIn profile, Nuwber can be useful for learning more about them, too.

Try Google Search Results

Google is an essential tool for discovering digital content. It can help you unearth LinkedIn profiles, too.

To search for people, type [first and last name] + LinkedIn on the search bar. After you hit enter, Google’s search results page will list the relevant results with links. To eliminate partial matches, you can type the first and last name within quotation marks.

If there are several LinkedIn profiles with the same name, use a few search terms or keywords related to the person. For example, if you know their company and job title, add that after the name. If they work in a specific industry, you can enter that as well.

To Summarize

LinkedIn is one of the top platforms for networking with professionals, identifying job opportunities, building databases, and connecting with potential leads.

But how can you find people on this platform? LinkedIn provides several effective tools, including a search bar with filters, a contact syncing feature, and connection suggestions. And if you know any mutual contacts, you can also review their 1st-degree connections for information.

When you’re looking for someone as part of your prospecting efforts, signing up for Sales Navigator is a good option. It allows you to search LinkedIn profiles using advanced search options while providing various other helpful tools to improve your search results.

Google searches can help discover LinkedIn profile pages, too, based on specific keywords. But if you need extra information or only have the relevant person’s contact details, Nuwber is an excellent platform to turn to. 

FAQ

How can I find a person on LinkedIn when I don’t know their full name?

If you don’t know the first or last name of a person, you can still discover their LinkedIn profile as long as you have some other identifiable information.

For example, you may know where they worked or studied or have their email address or phone number.

You can use such details to reverse search the relevant individual on LinkedIn or Google. Many search engines even allow image searches so you could unearth matching data related to a person’s photo.

Nuwber also provides the facilities to search people by address, phone number, and email.

What’s meant by a 1st-, 2nd- and 3rd-degree connection on LinkedIn?

When logged in, you’ll typically notice the “1st”, “2nd”, or “3rd” icon next to certain LinkedIn members’ names. This indicates the proximity of your connection to them.

For instance, those who have accepted your invitation to connect or have sent you an invitation (which you’ve accepted) are tagged as 1st-degree users.

These are the people you see when you click on the My Network tab. LinkedIn has capped such 1st-degree connections to 30,000 people.

The 2nd-degree users are part of the immediate circle of connections of your 1st-degree network. Those with the 3rd-degree icon are only connected to your 2nd-degree network.

How should I approach someone I discover on LinkedIn?

There are several ways to communicate with a LinkedIn user. If the relevant individual is part of your network, you can send them a direct message explaining who you are and your reasons for contacting them. When it comes to those outside your network, you must first send a connection request before you can message them.

However, if you prefer to build rapport first, interacting with their content by, for example, liking or leaving a comment on their posts is a better approach.

Of course, the best way to initiate contact with a LinkedIn user depends on the person and why you want to reach out to them.

What does it mean when I can’t find someone on LinkedIn?

You might not be able to locate information about an individual on LinkedIn due to various reasons.

In most cases, it’s likely that the relevant person has never opened an account on the platform. Deleting or hibernating a LinkedIn account could have a similar effect, preventing others from finding a particular user.

LinkedIn also provides several visibility options for users to determine who can view their profile. Members can, for instance, stop their profile from appearing on searches outside LinkedIn’s platform and allow only 1st-degree connections to discover them using their email or phone number.

Can someone tell if I search them on LinkedIn?

LinkedIn users are generally notified when they turn up on search results, although they can’t view who has searched for their details.

However, the identity of those browsing a particular profile page is usually disclosed to the relevant member.

If you prefer to check someone’s profile page while remaining anonymous, go to the dropdown menu of Settings, click “Visibility”, and then “Profile Viewing Options”.

This takes you to “Private profile characteristics” and “Private mode”. The former will disclose your company name, industry, or job title, while the latter will completely conceal your identity.

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