The LinkedIn profiles you cannot find with a normal search
TL;DR
1.7 million LinkedIn profiles in the Netherlands alone are invisible to location-based search, because those candidates never set a location. Filtering by city, province, or zip code silently drops them. Search on other signals instead of location to reach the candidates everyone else misses.
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.
How many LinkedIn profiles are missing from a location search?
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.
What happens in LinkedIn Recruiter or Recruiter Lite?
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.
Is it different on LinkedIn Basic or Premium?
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.
| Country | Profiles on LinkedIn | Reachable by location search | Invisible |
|---|---|---|---|
| Netherlands | 9.4 million | ~7.7 million | 1.7 million+ |
| Australia | 12 million+ | ~10 million | 2 million+ |
Method: total country profile count in LinkedIn Recruiter, compared against the result count when every province or state is selected individually. The difference is the set of profiles with no location below country level.
What is a better way to search the whole of 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.
Does the same gap exist outside the Netherlands?
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.
It is also not the only blind spot. LinkedIn hides intent as well as geography: a job title filter nobody announced surfaces people open to a role they do not currently hold.
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.
How do you find a genuinely scarce profile?
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.
Tricks like this work until LinkedIn changes the interface. A sourcing method that survives the next redesign is a different skill. We teach it in the AI Sourcing Masterclass.