Career center friends - I feel your pain...
LinkedIn just BROKE our beloved LinkedIn Alumni Tool. 😭 They pulled keyword search right out of it, so the one move we teach every single student - "show me alums who do the job I want" - got a LOT harder overnight.
And as someone who was on the team that built the tool, it stings for me too. 💔
But here's the good news: there's a workaround, and it's actually BETTER than the old tool ever was. 🙌 It takes about 20 seconds once you know it, and you can teach it in your very next workshop.
What Changed in the LinkedIn Alumni Tool
If you pull up any school's LinkedIn Page and click the Alumni tab today, you'll see a "People highlights" view - how many alums work in a given field, how many live in a given city, how many graduated in a given year.
What you WON'T see anymore is the search box. That box was the magic. A student could type "product marketing" or "nurse practitioner" and instantly see every alum doing that exact job.
Without it, the Alumni tab becomes something to browse, not something to search. And browsing 400,000 alums isn't a strategy - it's a time sink. 😮
(Fun fact: this isn't the first time LinkedIn has changed this tool on us. Back in 2025 I shared a fix for the last round of Alumni Tool changes. Same story, different chapter!)
The 4-Step Workaround (That's Actually Better)
Here's the whole move. Your students already have everything they need to do it - no Premium account required.
1. Type your keyword in the main LinkedIn search bar. Not on the school page - up top, in the same search bar you'd use to find anyone. And yes, Boolean works, so you can type something like "product marketing" OR "brand marketing".
2. Click "All filters." Once the results load, make sure you're looking at People, then click "All filters" at the end of the filter bar. A "People filters" panel slides out on the right.
3. Under "Schools," add your school - and then add EVERY school that counts. Click "+ Add a school," start typing your school's name and pick it from the dropdown. Then click "+ Add a school" again for every other campus page your alums might list.
4. Hit "Show results." 🔥 You'll now see everyone who matches your keyword AND went to any of the schools you picked.
That's it. Keyword search is back - it just lives in a different place now.
The Secret Sauce: Search Every School That Counts
Step 3 is where the workaround goes from "fine" to "WOW." 🤯
Here's why. Lots of universities have more than one LinkedIn Page. There's the main university, and then there's the business school, the law school, the med school, the engineering college...
Take Michigan. When I type "University of Michigan" into that Schools filter, LinkedIn offers me the University of Michigan AND the University of Michigan - Stephen M. Ross School of Business as two separate choices (plus the College of Engineering, the Medical School, Dearborn and Flint).
The old Alumni Tool made you pick ONE of those pages. So a Ross grad who only listed "Michigan Ross" on their profile was invisible from the main Michigan alumni page, and vice versa.
The People search fixes that. Add both schools and you get alums from either one, in a single list. For career centers that serve a whole university - or a professional school that wants its students to tap the entire campus network - that's a genuine upgrade.
Rule of thumb: if your alums might list it on their profile, add it to the Schools filter.
Boolean Keywords That Make the LinkedIn Alumni Tool Workaround Sing
The other upgrade is Boolean. The old Alumni Tool search box took simple keywords. The main search bar takes full Boolean search, which means students can describe a whole career path in one search instead of guessing one job title at a time.
A few patterns I teach:
Quotes for exact titles: "product marketing" finds that phrase, not every profile with "product" somewhere and "marketing" somewhere else.
OR for related titles: "product marketing" OR "brand marketing" OR "growth marketing"
NOT to cut the noise: "investment banking" NOT intern
And if a student doesn't know what titles to search for in the first place? That's a perfect job for AI. Have them paste this into ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini:
I'm a [year] at [school] studying [major]. I'm interested in careers in [field], but I don't know the exact job titles people use. Give me 3 LinkedIn Boolean search strings I can paste into LinkedIn's main search bar to find alumni doing this work. Put multi-word titles in quotes, connect related titles with OR, and explain in one sentence what each string will find.
Thirty seconds later they have three searches ready to run - and a much better sense of the field they're exploring. ⚡
Why Did LinkedIn Do This?
Honestly? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
My best guess is that it's some kind of cost-cutting move. It lines up with a tough stretch at LinkedIn: a WARN filing showed 606 California roles cut, effective July 13, 2026, with the CEO's memo talking about shifting investment toward areas like infrastructure. When teams shrink, older tools that don't drive revenue are often the first to get trimmed.
But that's a guess, not insider info - and I'd LOVE to hear your theories.
The Bottom Line
The Alumni Tool's search box is gone, but alumni search isn't. Teach your students to search from the main bar, use Boolean, and add every school that counts - and they'll find MORE alums than the old tool ever showed them. 🙌
If you want more ways to help students build a LinkedIn presence that alums actually respond to, grab my free LinkedIn profile resources.
That said, what the heck do YOU think is driving this change??? Let me know in the Comments!