Earlier this month, Recruiter reported how agency and in-house recruiters had hit out at LinkedIn over a redesign that affected the way members use free and premium service search functions.

Mark Jury, a recruitment manager at Bristol-based Parkway Engineering Services, a supplier of contractors, permanent staff, search & selection, MSP and RPO services across engineering, construction, manufacturing, aerospace, defence, rail, marine and power sectors, even went so far as to launch a petition calling for the following services to be restored:

• The ability to tag connections on free accounts
• On premium search features, the ability to sort companies by connection, search by postcode and within range of distances of people from a postcode or location
• The ability to use ‘AND’ and ‘NOT’ in Boolean searches

Jury’s petition had attracted 1,774 supporters as of this morning, while recruiter.co.uk’s coverage of the petition and frustration felt by recruiters due to the professional network’s redesign has been shared more than 1,000 times by our readers.

And late yesterday, Jury told Recruiter he had received an email from LinkedIn, seen by Recruiter, confirming the professional network plans to restore the following member services:

• Postal code radius search 
• The ability to use ‘AND’ and ‘NOT’ in Boolean searches
• Text search for company page, first and last name search, job title search and school fields 
• Sticky filters: When users select filters for searches they remain in place for future searches until they are deselected using the Clear all button at the top of their filter list

Commenting on the development, Jury told Recruiter: “I’m very happy… It’s the best news you could ever imagine. I think it was the right decision for them.

“To be fair to them, throughout the whole process, they have always been very professional and I couldn’t ask for more in terms of what they’ve done.”

Last week, David Flink, director of product management, search and discovery at LinkedIn, published a blog in which he confirmed in response to member feedback the gradual rollout of text fields for keyword searches, the ability to use ‘AND’ and ‘NOT’ in Boolean searches and sticky filters, but there was no word on the restoration of postal code radius searches.

However, a LinkedIn spokesperson has since told Recruiter the email is an accurate summary of the product areas it is looking at, adding LinkedIn will provide updates as they are available.