Find candidates from specific countries in your X-ray

X-raying LinkedIn is a great way to find candidates on LinkedIn using the Google search engine. It's free and relatively unrestricted.

One of the drawbacks many people encounter while X-raying LinkedIn is that you cannot search for the location field. There is a way however to search for candidates in specific countries, by using country codes in the domain after the site operator.

The reason this trick keeps working, while a lot of other LinkedIn X-ray tactics have quietly stopped, is that the country code lives in the URL rather than on the page. Public LinkedIn profiles (the version Google sees when it is logged out) show far less than the profile you see when you are signed in, so keyword X-raying into someone's experience or skills has become unreliable. The subdomain is structural. It is part of the address itself, so it survives whatever LinkedIn does to the page body.

How to use country codes in an X-ray

Step 1. Use the site operator site: including the /in addition in your Google search to search for LinkedIn profiles. That string looks like this: site:linkedin.com/in

Step 2. Find the country code of the country you want to search in, in the overview below (alphabetically ordered).

Step 3. Add the country code in front of the domain. For Canada the search string looks like this: site:ca.linkedin.com/in

Now you mostly get to see LinkedIn profiles from Canada in your Google search results. From there you add your normal keywords, so a Canadian data engineer becomes site:ca.linkedin.com/in "data engineer", and you narrow further from there.

The full list of LinkedIn country codes

The codes are the standard two-letter ISO 3166-1 country codes, which is convenient, because it means you can usually guess them. The one exception that matters is the United Kingdom, which is covered right below the table.

The United Kingdom is uk, not gb

This is the mistake that costs people the most time. In the ISO standard the United Kingdom is gb, but LinkedIn uses uk. So the string you want is site:uk.linkedin.com/in. LinkedIn's own help pages use the same convention, and so do its country pages.

Worth knowing: a two-letter subdomain resolving in your browser does not prove profiles live there. Practically every two-letter code points at LinkedIn's country-domain infrastructure, so gb.linkedin.com will load rather than throw an error, but that does not mean British profiles were filed under it. If a code returns almost nothing in Google, that is your answer regardless of whether the domain resolves.

The United States is the other one to watch. LinkedIn's help centre says only that members in certain countries get a country code, and plenty of profiles sit on plain www.linkedin.com. If a country search looks suspiciously thin, run the same query against site:linkedin.com/in with the country name as a keyword and compare.

What a country code actually tells you

Read this part before you trust a country X-ray, because the codes do not mean what most people assume they mean. According to LinkedIn's help centre, members in certain countries "have a public profile URL that begins with a 2-letter code based on the country listed on their profile". The operative words are listed on their profile. It is a self-reported field, not a location LinkedIn verified, and not a GPS reading.

That has two consequences a recruiter should care about. The first is that the code is country level and nothing finer. There is no subdomain for Toronto, so site:ca.linkedin.com/in plus the city as a keyword is as precise as this gets.

The second is more damaging, and it comes straight from the same help page: when a member changes the country on their profile the public URL changes with it, but the old URL keeps working. LinkedIn's own example is a profile that moves from uk.linkedin.com to us.linkedin.com, with the uk address still resolving. So a country X-ray can surface someone who left that country years ago and simply never had their old URL fall out of Google's index. Treat the result as "this person's LinkedIn is or was filed under this country", then confirm on the profile itself. For most sourcing that is fine. For anything where work authorisation or an on-site requirement is involved, it is not evidence.

If you run country searches often enough that hand-checking each of those caveats has become the job, that is the point where a purpose-built sourcing tool such as HeroHunt.ai starts to pay for itself, because it reads location as a field on the profile rather than inferring it from the address bar.

The country code finds the profile, not the person

The honest ceiling of this technique is that a finished X-ray hands you a page of profile URLs and no way to contact anybody on it. That is fine if you are going to connect on LinkedIn and accept the invite limits, and it is a real problem if you wanted to email fifty people this week.

Closing that gap means running the names through a contact database, and Apollo.io is one of the more common ways recruiters do it, mostly because it is the one with a free tier you can test the workflow on before spending anything.

The same warning from the section above applies to whatever database you use, by the way. A contact database's country field is derived and self-reported too, so it agrees with the LinkedIn subdomain more often than either of them agrees with where the person actually sits today. Two sources of the same assumption is not confirmation.

Used with that in mind, the country code is still one of the best free filters in sourcing. It costs nothing, it needs no LinkedIn subscription, and it is a single two-letter edit to a search string you were going to run anyway.