Advanced Search Tip for LinkedIn: How to Exclude a Company from Your LinkedIn Search Results

Have you ever been job searching on LinkedIn and your search results are just filled with a company? It might be because they're a really big employer in a market and all their jobs are dominating your search results. Well, there's a really cool little search tool you can do to exclude keywords, which includes company names, from your search results. All right. Let me show you how that works. All right. So here we are on LinkedIn with our job search. And if you've watched any of my other videos, you know I like to go to job slash search. Just gets you straight to this interface. And let's go ahead and search for a, we'll keep it a little broad here, marketing manager position. And we're going to look in Seattle, Washington. And yep. Pretty sure I was going to get jobs at Amazon and I was going to get jobs at Microsoft if I have to guess. We don't see any. They might be. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Redmond, which is close. Okay. So let's say, look, I don't want to work at one of those companies. I really want to work at a startup. I don't want to work at a big tech company. They're great. They're awesome. Maybe in the future, but the default interface of company, I just want to exclude companies and there's no built in way to do that, but you can do it with what are called search operators. All right. So we'll link to this article on LinkedIn's help in the comments down below in the description down below. But in the search, you can do what are called search operators. You can do a not search, which tells it not to be there and or search. So it meets either of those two. You don't really need that one as much because that kind of what search does by default. And so that two words together are there and then parentheses. So you can start to put some things together and quotation marks so that a term shows up exactly as you type it. All right. So let me show you that in action. So we're back here and I use that example of Microsoft. Again, Microsoft's a great company. I'd be happy to work there, but so no offense, Microsoft, but we're just going to use that here. So we're going to do marketing manager space, not in all capitals. That's really important for it to understand it. And we're going to say Microsoft and hit enter. Now, if I look at my search results, Microsoft is gone. What that means is you can start to use these terms to exclude jobs. So if I'm a marketer and let's say I'm bought into the Microsoft and Adobe and Salesforce ecosystem, but I don't know HubSpot and it's been a stickler in the jobs I've been applying to, so I'm just going to take HubSpot out. So same, we can do not HubSpot, right? So now any job that's in here is not going to have HubSpot in the job description. No offense to HubSpot. They're a fantastic platform and you should learn it. But that's just what came to my mind. You can use company names, you can use any kind of keyword. And if you combine that with the other filters, you can get pretty specific on the kind of jobs you can find using LinkedIn. All right. So those are the LinkedIn search operators. Highly recommend that you get good at those and get really specific with how you're using those terms to filter your job search. The other thing is you don't want to lose these queries and you don't have to recreate them every time. So what you can do is you can just bookmark this query. I use Chrome. I just hit command shift B on my keyboard to bring up my bookmarks bar and I can just like drag that there. So every day I can just click that and it'll rerun that search. Then what I recommend you do is you add these jobs to your job tracker. Any job you're excited about, add it to your job tracker. So this job at NBBJ, they're actually a really cool architecture firm. Bring it over to my teal Chrome extension. I can see what's needed. You know what? This one doesn't look like digital operations manager, less of a marketing manager. So I'm going to pass on that one. And I'm seeing that just by looking at the keywords. I don't even need to read the whole JD, right? Like these things aren't marketing terms. And so that helps me very quickly skim them. And so now as you get your list down, you can use this, uh, the teal Chrome extension to very quickly vet jobs, marketing pipeline, lead generation. Okay, cool. That works for me. That's something I'm interested in. Marketing, marketing, trends, sales, and marketing, biomedical. Not for me. Right? So you can use this as a quick way to get almost like the cliff notes of a job. Um, and we'll just take a few others, Amazon, some pretty cool stuff, acquisition marketing, paid marketing. I have skills for that. Let me go ahead and give it a shot. So I'll save it and that's it. Now I can go over to my bookmark jobs and there they are. Now I can spend a little more time on these in a consistent format. They all look the same. I've got all the keywords and the ones that I'm interested in. Um, I can then just go ahead and move over to the applying phase and move them through my funnel. The ones I don't want, I can just archive and get those out of my funnel. So it's really important that you groom your tracker and you sort of get rid of the ones you're not interested in and you keep adding to it on a daily basis. This is the really fast way to get that process going. All right. So hopefully that's helpful. That'll get you a little more specific with your job search, get you a little more aligned with the jobs that you're excited about, that you're a better fit for just some tactics on how to search and find those jobs. If you have any other questions or comments or things that you'd like to see us cover, please let us know in the comments down below. All right, best of luck with your job search.