*UPDATE*
I am really sorry to have to report that within 24 hours of posting this I was informed (by Irina) that LinkedIn have stopped this workaround.
I am leaving the post up because it has been shared so rather than land on a 404 error message I wanted you to see this.
The interesting question is this:
Why have LinkedIn got a messaging facility in groups? It is clearly redundant without a search field so why have it?
If anyone has any theories, please let me know. I am (not for the first time with LinkedIn) completely mystified!
LinkedIn recently updated their groups function, this wasn’t a minor update but a complete re-build from the ground up.
Overall I think the new design is an improvement but there is one major problem.
Someone forgot to put the member search field back in!
I wrote about this in much more detail in a recent post published on LinkedIn but in short this means that group messaging is now effectively impossible.
LinkedIn have stated that a member search field is ‘on their roadmap’ (whatever that means!) but in the short-term, thanks to the wonderfully talented Irina Shamaeva, I have a solution.
Step 1
Go to the main group page and copy the group ID number from the url
Step 2
Type the following url into the address bar;
https://www.linkedin.com/grp/members?gid=
now add the number you previously copied to the url after the =
Voila!
You now have the old members page of that group together with the search field so that you can now search for and, most importantly message any member for free.
Thanks Irina ?