professional networks offers a proprietary tool called professional networks Sales Navigator that - for a fee, of course - allows the user to apply advanced filtering to professional networks's data set. In this tutorial, I will briefly walk you through it so that you can see for yourself what it is and decide if you want to expend your once-in-a-lifetime free trial on it or maybe even subscribe.
How do you use the the platform Sales Navigator?
When you log into the platform Sales Navigator for the first time, you're invited to add a couple of leads, which will then ensure your first search screen isn't empty. Let's clear all that away and start from scratch so that we can build up a query from the beginning. Our screen looks like this (focused is the tab for searching for a person, or a "lead," and behind it is the tab for searching for a company, or an "account"):
You can get back here at any time by performing a search - any search at all - and then clearing it out. And speaking of search, Sales Navigator remembers the searches you've made while logged into your regular user experience, so you can easily redo them if you like.
If you click "See all filters" in the lower left-hand corner, the panel will double in width. Let's go ahead and do that and then take a look at a few filters to see what options are available. Since this isn't a guide on generating interesting leads, these options were chosen somewhat at random to demonstrate the functionality available.
In this example, we're looking at a subset of current Stripe employees with the job title Software Engineer and at least six years of experience. We're also excluding everyone from the San Francisco Bay Area - maybe your recruiters already tried reaching out to all potential local candidates, and you'll now look elsewhere for candidates who might be open to relocation (really, I wanted to demonstrate that you're able to negate certain things).
You can't negate all fields; for example, "First name," "Last name," and "Profile language" are all only include-or-empty. But when you can exclude, the interface looks like this:
You can also flip between include & exclude on a field you've already added by hovering it if you're trying to exhaustively filter through a large list of potential candidates and reach out to each one manually because you don't have access to an API to help you send automated outreach emails.