How to target by age on LinkedIn when no filter is available

 There are some great filters on LinkedIn.com to help you get a list of potential prospects and even more using their Sales Navigator tool, but neither of these has an age filter.

The problem with that is that many business owners and salespeople have a generational or specific age group target market for their products or services. But the filters don’t help with that kind of detail on this platform.

With a little creative thinking, however, there is a great resource that might be able to help. No, it’s not quite as good as a proper filter within LinkedIn, but it is a great place to start when you need this kind of specificity.

Let’s start with the list of the generations as a refresher starting from the baby boomers, as some are still in the workforce.

Baby Boomers 1946 to 1964  (57-75 years old)

Generation X 1965 to 1980  (41-56 years old)

Millennials 1981 to 1995  (26-40 years old)

Ƶ Generation Z 1996 to 2010  (11-25 years old)

If we look at their ages and assume that they went to University or College straight after graduating high school, then we have a place to start. No, it’s not foolproof considering some people on the list will be mature aged students, but it sure does go a long way to finding people and prospects via an age filter when non is available.

Let’s say you want to start with a target market between 40 and 45 years old. Start with selecting a university and click on the alumni tab. In this example we’re using the university of NSW.

That means they were born in 1975 to 1980 then graduating high school probably between 1993 and 2002. If they went straight into university, even if they only lasted the one year (as long as they’ve listed it on their LinkedIn profile) most would have graduated in within these years and therefore come up in the search results when you add these details into the ‘Start Year’ and ‘End Year’ filters (screenshot below).

In this example you can see that there are over 29,000 people to further filtered down from the results, but the majority should nicely fit within your target market now.

You can now see where they are currently residing and even the major company’s they work for such as Westpac or the NSW Department of Education as shown in this screenshot below.


What occupation they have now, and what they studied while at UNSW.

What occupation they have now, and what they studied while at UNSW.

What the top skills are on their profiles and how you are connected. 

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But of course, you’ll want to be able to click through to them all and really take a deeper look at each profile. All the results are down under those bar graphs ready for you to look over.

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As you can see where there’s a will there’s a way. LinkedIn might not provide the best filters for this kind of search, but with some clever thinking you can mostly work around. 

Once you have targeted your ideal client by age on LinkedIn, read this article on how to make the connection meaningful and effectively  build your LinkedIn network.

As published in f2f Magazine for Educate Plus, November 2021